



IN TOE 



LIGHT OF PRIMITIVE PRACTICE 



HUGH MILLER THOMPSON 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ABSOLUTION: 



EXAMINED IN THE 



Light of Primitive Practice. 



By 

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON, 

Bishop of Mississippi. 




SECOND EDITION. \*Vj 



NEW YORK! 

THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

2 and 3 Bible House. 



The Library 




^^SHiNGTON 






Copyright, 1872 and 1894, 
By Hugh iMiller Thompson - . 



Control 



Numt> er 




tmp96 



027857 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. page 

Forgiveness of Sins on Earth, . . . . .7 

CHAPTER II. 
Baptism, ........ 14 

CHAPTER III. 
The Church, , ...... 21 

CHAPTER IV. 
Excommunication, ...... 30 

CHAPTER V. 
.Penitence, ........ 38 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Officer of Discipline, ..... 45 

CHAPTER VII. 
Private Confession, . . . . . .51 

CHAPTER VIII. 
The Declaration of Absolution, or Remission of Sins, . 60 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Warning Before Communion, . . . .69 

CHAPTER X. 
The Essence of Absolution, ..... 79 

CHAPTER XI. 
Its Need, . . . . . . . .89 



PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 



The republication of this small treatise in a cheap form 
has been called for by a number of men for whose judg- 
ment I have regard. 

I think, myself, that the present time needs it, even 
more than the time of its first publication. It was intended 
as an Eiretiicon, but in the heated contentions of that 
period could scarcely find a hearing. 

It was recommended as " side reading," on the subject 
discussed, in one of our foremost Theological Schools, and 
the late Bishop Whittingham, in a letter published since 
his death, thus spake of it : 

Baltimore, February 18, 1873. 

" . . . On the subject of Confession I refer you to Dr. Thomp- 
son's tract on Absolution and Confession. It states, in admirable 
method and clearness, the true doctrine of the Church, Primitive and 
Catholic, as I have known and held it these forty years." 

It is needless to say that my views upon the subjects 
discussed remain the same. I cannot conceive of a 
change. 



vi Preface. 

It should be said that to Marshall's Penitential Disci- 
pline of the Primitive Church, a book too much neglected 
and forgotten, this little treatise owes nearly all its value. 

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON. 

Battle Hill, Jackson, Miss., 
April 4, 1894. 



PREFACE. 



The Church claims to exercise the power of absolution. 
She has, therefore, some doctrine upon the subject. That 
this doctrine is not the scholastic doctrine, crystallized into 
dogma by the Council of Trent, is scarcely necessary to say. 

The appeal to antiquity is always an appeal from schol- 
asticism to dogmatism, from the inferences of human reason 
to historic fact. If there is any peculiarity in the position 
of our Church at all, it is that she deliberately makes this 
appeal. Without it, her ground is not tenable for a day. 

She holds, therefore, whatever doctrine the primitive 
Church held concerning this matter of absolution, and 
intends to hold none other. How she practises upon the 
doctrine is quite another matter. 

The attempt, in some quarters, to explain her doctrine, 
or to improve her practice by the introduction of notions 
and practices taken from or imitated from Romanism is to 
blunder inexcusably, if no worse. Her doctrine is not differ- 
ent in degree from Rome's. It is different in kind. 

Confession, penitence, ministerial absolution — she teaches 
and practises them all. But they are only alike in name to 
the same things taught and practised in the Church of 
Rome. 



vni Preface. 

It has seemed to the writer that light might be thrown 
upon these matters by presenting in order certain well-known 
practices and principles of the ancient Church. In them 
only can be found, in his opinion, the true explanation of the 
doctrine of absolution as held in his own Church. 

He makes no claim to any new discovery, or any re- 
search which his clerical brethren are not able to make each 
for himself. He has only attempted to show the bearing of 
certain things with which all our clergy are supposed to be 
familiar, upon this particular doctrine, and, consequently, 
upon the formularies in the Prayer Book. 

With this explanation he commits these pages to the 
judgment of the Church. 

New York, Ash- Wednesday, 1872. 



ABSOLUTION. 



CHAPTER I. 

FORGIVENESS OF SINS ON EARTH. 

THE Church of God is a polity, — " the kingdom of 
heaven," "the kingdom of God." Like every other 
polity, it has officers and laws, courts and discipline, — the 
means to carry out its principles and protect itself from 
wrong and treachery. It is a kingdom not of the world. 
Its business is purely spiritual. It rules in the realm of the 
conscience. 

This Church of God is visible, however, and deals with 
visible men and visible acts. But it is, as visible, the cover- 
ing for what is invisible. It is the house of God on earth, 
seen, in which the Spirit of God dwells unseen, known only 
by His activities. 

The visible Church of God is, therefore, sacramental. 
Indeed, we may say she is herself the great Sacrament, ful- 
filling the definition of a sacrament — an outward and visible 
sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us (man- 
kind), ordained by Christ himself as a means whereby we 
receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof — and 
generally, that is in her very nature, necessary to our salva- 
tion. 

She has, therefore, her outward side visible, and her in- 
ward side invisible, for which the outward exists. So close 



8 Absolution. 

is the union, so perfect, ideally, is the relation, that the 
terms of the inward are, as in both sacraments, transferred 
to the outward ; the thing which signifies is called by the 
name of that which is signified. 

The purpose of the Church is to administer forgiveness 
to man. She is the kingdom of grace, sent to reconcile 
men to God, to bring them to His pardon and obedience. 
The good news that men need be no longer outcasts, that 
they may be accepted and pardoned and adopted as the 
children of God, is the news she has to tell over all the 
world. 

Sent to proclaim and administer an amnesty among rebels, 
and restore them to full citizenship again in the kingdom of 
God, she carries forgiveness in her hands. Without this 
her whole mission would be an impertinence. She preaches 
faith because faith is necessary before doing ; she preaches 
repentance because a man must abhor his rebellion before 
turning, but she preaches both as necessary for the reception 
of the great gift, — remission of sins. 

To get his blackened past cleared away, to have his 
rebellion wiped clean out, to have the assurance that it is 
remembered no more, that he is received as one fully and 
absolutely forgiven, is essential to him who would lead the 
new life of obedience. 

The Church is not only sent to preach that there is a 
forgiveness, to announce the terms on which that forgiveness 
may be obtained, and to urge men to accept it ; she is sent, 
also, to administer it, to sign and seal the forgiveness, to as- 
sure men that they have it in their hands. 

It was logically necessary that the commission should run, 
" Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them ; 
and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained." Without 
that commission the Church would have had no power to 
do the one work that among sinful men was needed. 

This commission, given to the eleven who were sent to 
build this kingdom of God on earth, was not a personal 



Forgiveness of Sins on Earth. 9 

commission, which was to cease with their lives. Its exer- 
cise is just as much needed in the nineteenth century as in 
the first. It will be always needed, because the condition 
and nature of men are always the same. It was given them 
as the heads of an Order, the Apostolic Order, which was 
to continue to the end of time — " Lo, I am with you alway, 
even unto the end of the world " — who especially were the 
administrators of forgiveness ; and it was given them also as 
the representatives of the kingdom they were to begin, — the 
kingdom of grace and forgiveness for all mankind. 

Crushed under guilt, hopeless and despairing because of 
sin, convicted before God and his own conscience, stained 
through and through, man first of all and last of all, and 
all the time, wants mercy and pardon. And God, to meet 
his sore and bitter need, established on the earth a kingdom 
whose law should be mercy and pardon, its banner the ban- 
ner of God's omnipotent pity and love. And to this king- 
dom He gave the administration visibly of that pity, pledging 
Himself to ratify whatsoever was done by it fitly in His 
name ; authorizing it not only to promise forgiveness to the 
burdened hearts of men, but visibly to assure them of that 
forgiveness ; to seal it and make it over to them individually ; 
to take them into a realm where forgiveness is the law, 
where the air they breathe is mercy, where the pardon of 
God is the charter of life. 

"The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins." 
Power on earth, because forgiveness is needed on earth. 
Power on earth, because the Son of Man redeemed the earth, 
at awful price, for His own. A power which always lasts; a 
power which is always needed ; a power never taken from 
the earth, but left with His body — " the fulness of Him that 
filleth all in all" — when He departed ; a power which is just 
as large and competent upon the earth to-day as it was when 
those words were uttered ; a power continued expressly in 
those two utterances, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto 
the end of the world," and " Whosesoever sins ye remit, 



IO Absolution. 

they are remitted ; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are 
retained " 

It is not fair nor honest to explain away these words, 
nor to deny their plain force and meaning. They stand re-, 
corded, deliberately and solemnly. They are surrounded 
with everything that can add to their power. We cannot 
honestly pass them by as if they were not there. We dare 
not garble the gospel, and especially we dare not garble it 
in the very article in which, above all, it is the gospel — the 
announcement of forgiveness. The words are not there 
without a purpose. They have some meaning. If we can- 
not find it, so much the worse for our conception of the 
whole truth of God. If we are frightened from the plain 
words of our Lord by fear of " Romish error," is it not 
more than a half confession that " Romish error " has more 
to say for itself than we dare confess ? There must be some 
sense in which it is true that the power of forgiving sins 
remains on the earth still, and is visibly exercised before 
the eyes of men ; some sense in which a man has a pledge 
and assurance that he is forgiven, that the pardon has really 
issued to him. 

We said that the kingdom of God on earth has the visi- 
ble side and the invisible. She therefore acts in all she 
does sacramentally, — acts in outward things with an inward 
meaning, in material things with a spiritual purpose. She 
acts, too, as an agent by appointment and according to the 
will of Him who sent her. She administers the law of par- 
don on the specified conditions. She did not make those 
conditions, and can neither extend nor restrict them. Act- 
ing according to her instructions, administering the law as 
the law was given, her acts are valid, and actually bind her 
principal, — so that whatsoever is bound on earth is bound in 
heaven, and whatsoever is loosed on earth is loosed in 
heaven. 

But the outward administration is in the hands of fallible 
men. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels." It is 



Forgiveness of Sins on Earth. 1 1 

possible that men, since they cannot read the heart, may 
administer pardon where the conditions of pardon may not 
exist, or may refuse to administer it where they do. In that 
case God is not bound by the error of His agent. The 
commission goes on the supposition that the conditions are 
complied with. But admitting this liability to mistake, it 
still remains, from the essentially sacramental character of 
the Church, that the outward act is fitly named with the 
name of the inward act which it signifies, — the existence of 
the conditions is taken for granted, and pardon is said to 
be given when its outward and visible sign is given, let that 
be what it may. 

We need hardly say to any thoughtful reader, that here 
is no denial of the fact that God alone forgives sin. The 
act of the Church in the matter is ministerial and adminis- 
trative for men in the flesh. The power in the case is con- 
ferred because of human infirmity, because men are in the 
body, and are to be reached through the avenues of the 
bodily senses. 

God plants on earth an outpost of His kingdom. He 
gives that kingdom the laws of heaven. Those laws are to 
be administered by men, for men, in a visible and material 
world. The laws themselves are perfect. The administra- 
tion of them may be imperfect. Nevertheless that imperfec- 
tion must be accepted, else there can be no administration 
of these laws at all on earth. And their administration on 
earth is sacramental. There is an outward act which has 
its whole force from the unseen reality it symbolizes. This 
outward act is needed because men have bodies as well as 
souls. 

The official and sacramental assurance of forgiveness, the 
giving over and sealing of pardon to the individual authori- 
tatively, are demanded by the wants of human nature, and 
in some form or other are given by all bodies who claim to 
be Churches and to act in Christ's name. Men demand this 
much of them, and, whether or no, they are obliged to give 



1 2 Absolution. 

what is demanded, — an assurance that they consider the 
soul forgiven. It is not only that men ask of a Church or 
ministry, " What must I do to be saved ? " it is, also, that 
they almost compel that Church or ministry to pass judg- 
ment on their doing, to decide whether they have fulfilled 
the requirements, whether the conditions have been com- 
plied with, and whether, therefore, the individual may be 
sure that, in his case, the pardon has issued. 

Among those who have lost almost all idea of the sacra- 
mental character of Christianity, or who actually scout the 
idea, human nature asserts its understanding of the Gospel, 
and men examine their fellows and decide whether they 
may or may not count themselves pardoned. The relation 
of ah " experience " by those who, in some bodies, are said 
to "indulge a hope;" the passing upon that "experience," 
and deciding whether or not it is a sufficient one ; and the 
admission afterward to baptism or communion upon it, is a 
real exercise, under all its disguises, of the administrative 
and sacramental power of forgiveness. 

No man who has had much experience in dealing with 
the consciences of other men but knows that the trembling 
human soul demands the verdict of its fellows, yearns to 
hear its pardon pronounced by human lips, longs for the 
human assurance that its professed repentance and faith are 
real and sufficient, is not content only with the declaration 
that God will pardon or does pardon, but wants also to be 
told that God has pardoned, and will not be content without 
the assurance that He has. 

The forgiveness in heaven must have its counterpart on 
earth. The voice that speaks in the world invisible must be 
uttered also in the speech of men. In the name of God the 
voice of man must speak to the trembling heart of man, 
and say, "Thy sins are forgiven;" and though that voice, 
because it is the voice of erring man, may be now and again 
mistaken, yet, nevertheless, for man's poor sake, it is author- 
ized in God's name, in the exercise of that Divine charity 



Forgiveness of Sins on Earth. 1 3 

that hopeth all things, to pronounce the assurance to the 
trembling soul. 

In what ways the Church administers this commission of 
pardon we shall inquire hereafter. Enough now to say that 
she is not only sent to proclaim forgiveness, but also to 
assure it that she has been so sent because the burdened 
and broken heart of man needs a living voice speaking on 
earth if it is to hear in the dust where it lies, and that, from 
the very purpose for which she was sent, from the very need 
she was to supply, and by the very terms of her commission, 
the Church is not going through empty forms, but adminis^ 
tering a reality ; none the less so, that it is ministerial anH 
sacramental, and not in her own name, but in the name 01 
the King. 



CHAPTER II. 

BAPTISM. 

HAVING explained that the remission of sins, as 
conferred upon the Church to exercise visibly on 
earth, is a sacramental and ministerial forgiveness, and that 
the forms in which it is administered are intended to express 
on earth what is done in heaven, being material symbols of 
spiritual realities, we proceed to consider the first of those 
forms, — Baptism. 

This sacrament is the door of admission into the kingdom 
of God. It is the form of naturalization by which a man re- 
nounces allegiance to all other powers — the world, the flesh, 
and the devil — and takes the oath of allegiance to God. In 
a state of alienation and rebellion, the gospel comes to him. 
He accepts it and determines to live by it ; is converted — that 
is, repents and believes — and then proceeds to put himself 
under the gospel law as his supreme law thenceforth. The 
form appointed for doing so was prescribed by the Lord 
himself, — " Go ye and teach (disciple) all nations, baptizing 
them" Baptism was to make men confessedly and openly 
Christ's disciples, servants, and followers. 

It involved, in its very idea, the sacramental assurance of 
the remission of sins. A man would need to be disburdened 
of his past before he could make a new future. He could 
not be admitted into the kingdom of grace and forgiveness 
with a load of sins upon him. In that case it would be no 
kingdom of grace and forgiveness to him. The rebel must 
be pardoned his rebellion before he can become a loyal 
Bubject or citizen. 



Baptism. 1 5 

We need hardly say that fitness on the part of the 
candidate is always presupposed. The supposition is that 
he is honest, that he really repents and really believes. His 
baptism goes upon that supposition. The Church would 
have no right to baptize him, she would be acting very 
falsely to her mission to baptize him if she had reason to 
distrust his professions and to suppose him a hypocrite. 

But she cannot read the heart, — God alone knows that. 
She can only deal with what she was sent to deal with, — the 
realm of the visible. She baptizes a man, gives him the 
outward and visible sign of full remission for all his past 
sins, and admits him, a pardoned man, into the kingdom of 
God. If the conditions are all present, the act done visibly 
is done also invisibly, — the remission on earth is the coun- 
terpart of the remission in heaven. 

As we remarked before, the outward acts are named from 
their inward reality, and therefore baptism is called " baptism 
for the remission of sins. " x Therefore we read of the " wash- 
ing of regeneration." Therefore it is said, "Arise and be 
baptized, and wash away thy sins." 

Now, the sacramental remission given in baptism, which 
baptism was instituted visibly to sign and seal, is directly 
connected with, and indeed is, the great act under the com- 
mission, " Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto 
them." 

The Lord promised first to St. Peter, " I will give unto 
thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever 
thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven ; and 
whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in 
heaven." This promise was fulfilled to Peter, and the keys 
were actually given when the Lord commissioned the whole 
eleven, St. Peter among them. Whatever it meant to St. 
Peter it meant to all the rest, for when the promise was ful- 

1 'QfioAoyovjuev ev /3dxr*ff/za elg cupeoiv d/xapTiuv* — Creed of Constanti- 
nople, A.D. 581. 



1 6 Absolution. 

filled the same words were spoken to all. And yet there was 
a meaning in the fact that the promise was given to St. Peter 
first. That meaning is seen on the day of Pentecost, when 
St. Peter actually first uses the keys, delivers the first sermon, 
admits to the first baptism, and so first opens the kingdom of 
heaven. He then " loosed on earth," when it is recorded, 
" Then they that gladly received his word were baptized, and 
the same day there were added about three thousand souls." 

Baptism is itself, therefore, the first and great absolution, 
the grand act of ministerial remission of sins. To remember 
this will help us to understand the real nature of absolution, 
for all absolution must be a thing in its nature essentially the 
same under all forms. 

The Church of Rome founds her doctrine of priestly ab- 
solution on the commission we have quoted, and denies that 
that commission is exercised unless when auricular confes- 
sion is practised, and judicial absolution is issued upon such 
confession. But it is manifest that if baptism be for the re- 
mission of sins, as the Catholic Creed, following Scripture, 
declares, then it is administered under the one commission, 
and is itself an exercise of that commission, a real issue of 
absolution, and that the most rijarked and significant abso- 
lution which the Church can confer. 

The ancient writers place baptism on the same ground 
with all other forms of absolution, deriving all from the same 
commission as above. Cyprian denies the validity of heret- 
ical baptism, on the express ground that heretics are not in 
the line of those to whom it was said, " Whosesoever sins ye 
remit, they are remitted unto them." 2 Indeed, throughout the 

2 Sed et ipsa interrogatio quae fit in Baptismo, testis est veritatis. Nam 
quum dicimus " Credis in vitam aeternam et Remissionem peccatorum per 
sanctam Ecclesiam?" intelligimus remissionem peccatorum non nisi in 
Ecclesia dari : apud Haereticos autem, ubi Ecclesia non sit, non posse 
peccata dimitti. — Cyprian, Epist. lxx. ad Episc. Numid. p. 190. 

Scripsisti mihi, Frater carissime, desiderans significari tibi motum 
animi nostri quid nobis videatur de Haereticorum baptismo, qui /oris 



Baptism. 1 7 

whole discussion which he carried on upon the question of 
heretical baptism, he makes this the ground of his argument, 
that the heretics are not in the line of the commission, and 
therefore cannot grant the great remission or absolution of 
baptism. 

Cyril of Alexandria, expounding the same words, says : 
"According to my opinion men, endowed with the same 
Spirit, remit or retain sins in two ways : They call to bap- 
tism those who are worthy by a good life and a true faith, or 
they refuse those who are unworthy ; or, in another way, they 
remit or retain sins when they punish the sinning children 
of the Church, and pardon them again upon repentance." 3 

The Novatian sectarians of the third and fourth centuries 
are usually considered schismatics, and not heretics. They 
separated from the Church, not because it taught false doc- 
trines, but because it was not holy enough for them. It re- 



positi, et extra Ecclesiam constituti, vindicant sibi rem nee juris sui nee 
potestatis, quod nos nee ratum possumus nee legitimum judicare, quando 
hoc apud eos esse constet illicitum, etc. — Idem, Epist. lxxiii. ad Jubaiam, 
p. 198. 

Quod si aliquis illud opponit, ut dicat, eamdem Novatianam legem 
tenere, quam Catholica Ecclesia teneat, eodem symbolo quo et nos, bap- 
tizare ; eumdem nosse Deum Patrem, eumdem Filium Christum, eumdem 
Spiritum Sanctum, ac propter hoc usurpare eum potestatem baptizandi 
posse, quod videatur in interrogatione baptismi a nobis non discrepare : 
sciat quisquis hoc opponendum putat, primum non esse unam nobis et 
schismaticis symboli legem ; neque eamdem interrogationem. Nam quum 
dicunt, " Credis in remissionem peccatorum et vitam aeternam per sanctam 
Ecclesiam?" Mentiuntur in interrogatione quando non habent Ecclesiam. 
— Idem, Epist. lxxvi. ad Magnum, p. 296. 

3 'Aftdat ye /ar)v dfiapriac, 7) rot mT&xovoiv 6c TrvEVfiaTotydpoi, Kara 6vo 
rpo7rovf, nard ye didvoiav e/it)v ' 7) yap mXovaiv ettI to fiairTLCfia rove, dig 
av 7]$rj ml tovtov Tvxetv cxpeihero did tt)v tov (3lov aefivdrTjra^ ml to dedo- 
Kifiaa/xivov elg tt'igtcv t) diatciohvovci Tivag ml Tfjg deiag x<*P lT °£ H ei py° v ~ 
civ etl ovttu riug ysyovSTag f-iovg ' 7/ ml Kciff ETtpov Tpoirov aQidci te ical 
upaTovci dfiapriag, kiuTtfLavTsg fikv dfiapTavovci Toig rr)g kutiTiTjciag Tinvoig, 
fiETavoovai 6e cvyyiv6cK0VTig. — Cyril. Alex. lib. xii. in Joan. xx. 23. 



1 8 Absolution. 

admitted " the lapsed " (those who had fallen away under 
the stress of the bitter persecution of Decius) after due trial 
of their sincere repentance. To this the Novatians objected, 
claiming that though God might forgive these " lapsers," the 
Church could not, and that she defiled herself by admitting 
them to communion. Therefore they withdrew in that spirit, 
never uncommon, which finds expression in the words, " I am 
holier than thou." In process of the controversy they were 
led to deny a place for repentance and readmission into the 
visible Church, not only to " lapsers," but to all guilty of great 
crimes. 

The Novatians, therefore, as one sees, were not schis- 
matics merely. Like all schisms, the schism of Novatus, 
like that of Donatus afterward, issued in heresy. That 
heresy was the denial of the power of the keys to the Church. 
It held that while God in heaven may forgive certain sins, 
the Church on earth cannot forgive them, and must forever 
exclude from her communion those guilty of them. 

But the Church, on the other hand, has always held that 
what may be forgiven in heaven may also be forgiven on 
earth, that what God can pardon men can, that those fit to 
enter the Church triumphant are also fit to commune with 
the Church militant, and, therefore, she refuses her ministerial 
absolution to no sin whatever, on the evidence of sincere 
repentance and amendment of life. 

And she pressed the Novatians with the text of the great 
commission, and brought the argument home to them from 
their own practice. St. Ambrose, writing against them, in 
his book, De Penitentia, asks, " Why baptize ye, if sins can- 
not be remitted by men ? For in baptism there is remission 
of all sins. What difference is it whether priests assume 
this power as given them in baptism, or in the administra- 
tion of penance?" 4 Here again, as above, the absolution 

* Cur baptizatis, si per hominem peccata dimitti non licet ? In bap- 
tismo utique remissio peccatorum omnium est : quid interest, utrum per 



Baptism. 19 

granted in baptism, and that granted to returning penitents, 
are both considered as different exercises of the same au- 
thority, both founded on the same words. 

It is only a Novatian error to claim that the power of 
binding and loosing is exercised only in what is technically 
called absolution, — the pronunciation of a specified form by 
a priest. The power of the keys, the authority conferred in 
the words, " Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted 
unto them ; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained," 
has its great and characteristic exercise in baptism. There 
the great remission (as the ancients called baptism) is given. 
There the Church stands forth especially in her character 
of the minister on earth of God's grace and forgiveness. s It 
follows that, whatever be the character of the absolution in 
baptism, whatever be the meaning and nature of it in that 
sacrament, the same must be its character, meaning, and 
nature all through. 

Now, the absolution given by the Church in baptism is 
administrative. She is doing on earth what she humbly be- 
lieves God is sanctioning in heaven. She confers the out- 
ward sign. God, present, reads the heart, and He himself 
confers or withdraws the inward grace. The Church deals 
with the visible. That is all she can do. She leaves God 
to deal with the invisible. She washes the body, she trusts 
God washes the soul. She is sure, on His own word, that 
He does, if the soul is willing and ready. She can but take 



poenitentiam, an per lavacrum hoc jus sibi datum Sacerdotes vindicent ? 
Unum in utroque mysterium est (Quidam MSS., ministerium). — S. 
Ambj-ose, De Poenitentia, cap. viii. \ 36. 

5 Baptismus, vero quod est Sacramentum Re?nissionis peccatorum. — 
Aug. De Bapt. lib. v. cap. 21. 

Paschae tempore Presbyter et Diaconus per Parochias dare Remissio- 
nevi peccatorum (hoc est baptismum), et ministerium implere consueverunt 
etiam praesente Episcopo. — Cone. Roman, can. vii. Coleter. vol. i. p. 282. 

Parvuli baptizantur in Remissionem peccatorum. — Origen in Luc. 
Horn. xiv. 



20 Absolution. 

it for granted that it is, when the man so vows and professes. 
Therefore, on the supposition that he is dealing truly, she 
pronounces his sins forgiven in the name of the Lord, de- 
clares him washed and cleansed and new-born into the kins:- 
dom of mercy and light, transacts before the eyes of men 
visibly what she believes is going on invisibly before the eyes 
of angels. 

" But the man's sins may not be forgiven after all." 
True enough. He may be, as in the early day was one of 
the first men baptized into the visible Church, Simon Magus, 
yet "in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity." 
But it does not change the nature of baptism, that one man 
or ten thousand men have made a mock of it. All that is 
said of it, is said on the understanding that it is rightly used 
and received. It does not annihilate the act of amnesty, 
that many a rebel makes oath under it and remains still a 
rebel at heart. 

The Church still stands on earth the visible type of God's 
walled kingdom in the eternal heavens, a poor, failing, feeble, 
earthly type of a high, eternal reality. Admission to the 
type God intends to be admission to the reality, membership 
in the earthly kingdom of heaven to be also membership in 
the heavenly kingdom. And baptism, which admits into the 
kingdom below, is also the visible symbol of the admission 
into the kingdom above. As men have to deal with it, it 
only concerns admission to the kingdom below, — it is admin- 
istrative. They are men, and may deal with it imperfectly. 
But dealt with sincerely, as men admit into the struggling 
kingdom here, so God admits to the great kingdom eternal, 
and as the man enters forgiven into the visible Church, God 
receives him, coming truly, and remits in heaven what is also 
remitted here. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE CHURCH. 

BAPTISM admits a man into the kingdon of grace and 
forgiveness. The law of that kingdom is pardon. 
Theoretically, all its members are in a state of grace. They 
are all pardoned. Practically, we know it is not so. There 
are those in the kingdom who are not of it. But the visible 
Church cannot read the heart. She can but go on what she 
sees, and the theory of her constitution and nature is that 
she is made up of those who are living under God's law of 
pardon. Although, as a matter of fact, she knows that all 
her members are not under the law, yet, in any individual 
case, where she knows nothing to the contrary, she mast con- 
sider the person a saved man. We read, with reference to 
admission into this kingdom, in the Acts of the Apostles, that 
" the Lord added to the Church daily such as should be 
saved." In the original it is literally the saved} 

In agreement with this idea, we find St. Paul, in his 
epistles, addressed to the visible Church in Corinth, Philippi, 
Colosse, and Ephesus, addressing the brethren as " saints." 
"The saints which are at Philippi," for instance. It is a 
common title for all who are baptized and in the communion 
of the visible Church, although, as is clear from the tenor 
of some of the epistles, there were many among them (as in 
Corinth especially) who were not entitled to the name. 

1 '0 6e Kvpiog irpogeTiQet tovq au^o/nevovg naff qjiipav ry EK^gia. 
Acts, ii. 47. 



2 2 Absolution. 

In the same way St. Peter addresses his first epistle to 
the " elect," where it is clear he is addressing the whole body 
of the baptized. In truth, as one can see on a moment's 
reflection, the epistles were addressed to all the members of 
the various Churches, and all the promises, warnings, exhor- 
tations, titles, were the common property of every member 
of the Church, — they were the " holy generation," the " royal 
priesthood," the "peculiar people." They were the "holy 
temple," the "building of God." They were the "saints," 
the "faithful," the "elect." And yet we need only the 
epistles themselves to show us that practically the ideal of 
the Church was very far from being realized under the 
Apostles. 

A great deal of confusion arises, unnecessarily, from 
failing to remember that the New Testament was written 
in the visible Church, and for the visible Church. It 
seems strange that the epistles, especially, which are ad- 
dressed by name to visible Churches and their members, 
should be treated with entire forgetfulness that their prom- 
ises, threats, warnings — indeed, all they contain — are specifi- 
cally applied to baptized people and to none others, unless 
those others are carefully named. And the whole theory 
of those epistles is that those inside the visible fold are 
saved, are pardoned, are in a state of grace, are " washed 
and sanctified," are delivered from the power of sin, and 
dwell in the light and life of God. 

As we have said, it was just as well known then as it is 
now that all baptized people were not such. But the visible 
Church, the outward sign of the eternal, invisible kingdom 
of God, can only go on visible facts. She was obliged, at 
the beginning, as she will be to the end, to take the pre- 
sumption of her position, to name the thing signifying by 
the name of the thing signified, acting sacramentally, and to 
consider her members, unless in each case there is proof to 
the contrary, as pardoned, saved, and in a state of grace. 
It is to pardoned people, to people presumed, at least, with- 



The Church. 23 

out question, to be pardoned, that all her means of grace 
are offered. They have positively no meaning whatever 
except to these. They are admitted that they may partake 
of them. They are pardoned at the door that they may be 
fit to receive them. 

" But men within the visible Church, even the best, are 
not free from sin." That is true. They have not come 
into the Church because they are perfect, but because they 
are imperfect. The Church is a hospital, in one point of 
view, of souls sick unto death, who have been taken in to be 
cured. And they are taken in subject, as yet, to all the 
weaknesses and failings of a sinful nature. Nevertheless, 
the express contract which they make at admission is that 
they will fight their sins, and, in God's strength, live in 
God's service with living repentance and living faith. 

While faithfully struggling in this warfare they are en- 
titled to all the helps given in the " means of grace," — the 
worship, the sacraments, the ordinances of the kingdom. It 
was to give them such helps that all these things were estab- 
lished. They have their value from that purpose. And 
while the fight honestly goes on, no matter how weak the 
fighter, he finds the help these means were given to convey. 
It is only when he turns traitor and gives up to the devil, when 
all his sins come back upon him, because he has gone back 
to them, that these means convey nothing to him except 
condemnation. 

And, among all the graces which the means of grace 
convey to the struggling soul, this is not the least, — the 
reiterated and renewed sense of forgiveness. They are 
intended, among other things, to keep alive in the soul the 
sense of its forgiveness, its near relation to God ; to assure 
it again and again, daily, habitually, that, possessed of true 
faith and true repentance, it may cast aside all slavish fear, 
and live and work with the living and abiding conviction of 
pardon and peace. Each participation in the Holy Com- 
munion, each act of worship or praise, each reading of the 



24 Absolution. 

word and promises of God, ought to convey anew the as- 
surance of the soul's deliverance. For it is admitted into 
the kingdom whose law is forgiveness. It has come not to 
Mount Sinai but to Mount Zion, not to Jerusalem in bondage 
but to Jerusalem free, not to the law but to the Gospel, not 
to slavery but to the adoption of sons. There is now no 
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, members 
of His body, His flesh, and His bones. 

Thus, in the New Testament, the Church presents itself 
as the hedged-in kingdom of God, where God's grace, mercy, 
and pity reigned supreme. Outside was the evil world. 
Inside were those saved from that evil world, delivered from 
sin and from the fear sin wrought. The Church stands 
there a harbor of refuge, the ark in the deluge. She calls 
on all to fly to her arms for succor. She assures them that 
within her embrace there is forgiveness for all transgression, 
and a new life of holiness. She repeats the cry of Her Mas- 
ter, " Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden ; " 
for to come to Him was, according to His command, to come 
to her. 

Baptism is, therefore, the sacramental sign of forgiveness 
at entrance. But inasmuch as a man is not delivered from 
the power of sin, but continues, though a faithful Christian, 
with true faith and true repentance to yield to temptation 
and sin daily, in thought, word, or deed, he needs also the 
assurance of forgiveness daily. And this assurance is 
abundantly furnished him in the kingdom of grace. 

We are not now speaking of sins which separate the 
soul from God, of sins which are deadly, breaches of the law 
on which the pardoned soul stands, sins which are treason 
against the King, and which renew the rebellion and forfeit 
the Christian position. We are speaking of those remains 
of sin which, in a man with living faith and hearty repent- 
ance, and under the sanctifying influence of God's grace, 
still inhere in his imperfect nature, and which, if allowed to 
go on, will poison that nature to its ruin again. 



The Church. 25 

For these there is absolution in the word and doctrine 
in the daily prayers — public or private, in the confession of 
them to God, in the scriptures that announce God's promises, 
and especially in the Holy Communion, which, rightly re- 
ceived, holds the soul in living communion with its Saviour. 
For these, to the sincere believer, there is no condemnation 
in the kingdom of grace. Of his pardon of these he is assured 
by every official act of the Church, of which he is a living 
member. The great tide of life-giving pardon surging 
through her heart, goes to the utmost extremity, visits the 
smallest member, and, while the Holy Communion lasts, 
assures him that he is freely pardoned. . 

"For the daily sins," says Augustine, "from which no 
man's life is free, the daily prayer of the faithful obtains 
pardon." 2 

And St. Ambrose writes : " Some sins are remitted in the 
saying of the daily prayer, ' Forgive us our debts as we for- 
give our debtors.' " 3 

St. Augustine again has the same, speaking of various 
kinds of sin, some of which deserve reproof, and some excom- 
munication and penance ; and others, " from which the life 
cannot be free, are cured by the daily medicine which He 
left when He taught us to say, ' Forgive us our debts as we 
forgive our debtors.' " 4 Again he says, of two sorts of re- 
pentance for sins after baptism : " There is another daily 
repentance. And where can we show it ? I know not where 

2 De quotidianis brevibus levibusque peccatis, sine quibus haec vita 
non ducitur, quotidiana oratio Fidelium satisfacit. — Aug. Enchirid. c. 
lxxi. p. 163. 

3 Si alia peccata habuerit, quae quotidie dimittantur in oratione dicenti, 
Dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. — 
Ambrose, Exhort, ad Poenit. 

4 Postremo nisi essent quaedam, sine quibus haec vita non agitur, non 
quotidianam medelam poneret in oratione quam docuit, ut dicamus, Di- 
mitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. — 
Aug. De Fide et Operibus, c. xxvi. p. 140. 

2 



26 Absolution. 

I can better show it than in the daily prayer which the Lord 
taught us to pray to the Father." 5 This prayer, to which so 
much is attributed, was called by the ancients " the prayer 
of the faithful" 6 the peculiar prayer left as a legacy to His 
own true disciples by our Lord. 

In speaking this way of sins of daily incursion, St. Augus- 
tine and the other fathers are not to be understood as teach- 
ing that they are of trifling consequence. It is in this very 
connection that Augustine uses the expression, "A small 
leak neglected will sink a ship, as well as a boisterous wave." 7 
They are rather warnings against the little sins to which the 
best men are exposed, against neglecting or forgetting them, 
and allowing them to grow. They are calling men to repent 
of them, to ask God to forgive them, and persuading them 
daily and habitually to fight them. 

But what they wish to assure them of is, that these sins, 
in the kingdom of grace, to the struggling and failing but 
faithful souls, are forgiven by the very law of the kingdom, 
to sincere repentance daily. They are not to remain as a 
guilty burden on conscience. God remits them to His be- 
lieving children upon their asking. They are not recorded 
against them. Daily confession and daily prayer, keeping 
the soul in living communion with its Saviour, procures daily 
remission. While that living communion is kept, all the 
gracious promises belong to it. It can claim all things in 



5 Est alia poenitentia quotidiana, et ubi illam ostendimus ? Non habeo 
ubi melius ostendam quam in Oratione quotidiana, ubi Dominus orare nos 
docuit, quid ad Patrem dicamus ostendit, et in his verbis posuit, Dimitte 
nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. — Aug. 
Horn, xxvii. ex. I. p. 954. 

6 r 'Eira ETTidslg ttjv kvxv v T & v ttictcjv evravda kiravETo, tig nopuvida riva 
ical cvvdecjuov vTrep iravruv rrjv kvxv v ^oi^cd/xevog, — Chrysos. Jlomit.x. in 
Coloss. p. 234. 

7 Hoc facit sentina neglecta, quod facit fluctus irruens : paullatim per 
sentinam intrat, sed diu intrando et non exhauriendo mergit navem. — 
Aug. Tract, in foan. xvi. p. 284. 



The Church. 27 

the treasures of mercy for its own. It lives under the law, 
and while conscientiously doing so, the law is supreme, — and 
the law is pardon. 

But the great sacramental assurance of forgiveness offered 
in the kingdom of grace is the Holy Communion. That sac- 
rament belongs and applies only to the truly repentant and 
the truly faithful, — not to the sinless, but to those who are 
struggling faithfully in the good fight against their sins. Ad- 
mission to it is evidence that a man is a living member of 
Christ, and an heir of salvation. It is the Father's table 
spread for His sons, the great unchangeable sign and symbol 
of the fatherhood and the adoption. It is the crowning and 
culminating act of visible communion, and none can have 
communion unless his sins be forgiven. In the Church, 
therefore, we may say that all services are absolvatory. None 
but absolved souls can be true members of the Church. In 
idea, every Church member is a pardoned man. If he is not, 
he has no right or title to be in the Church. 

All her prayers and praises ; her teaching, reading, pray- 
ing ; the word and doctrine ; and especially the Holy Com- 
munion, the central act of living communion with Christ, 
convey assurance of pardon, and over and over again sign and 
seal pardon. The force of the words, " Whosesoever sins ye 
remit, they are remitted unto them," are not spent in one act 
or form, — they pervade the whole life of the Church, and 
every official act she does under that commission is an act 
that releases from the bonds of sin. 

In other words, the Church herself is the world's absolu- 
tion, and she offers the great absolution to all who will ac- 
cept it ; and to those who do accept it, and come within the 
kingdom of grace, she gives it continually as their birth-right. 
Pardon belongs to them. They inherit it by the adoption. 
She tells them so, assures them of the fact day in and out, and 
especially gathers them about the Lord's table, and delivers 
into their hands its emphatic, visible seal. 

Theologians have spoken of the absolution of the word 



28 Absolution. 1 

and doctrine, the absolution of prayer, the absolution of the 
eucharist, the absolution of imposition of hands. They are 
really all one in kind. These absolutions belong to the 
faithful, they apply solely to them in a state of grace and for- 
giveness. They are for members of the body, and none else. 
They are means to assure the justified and regenerate that 
they are justified and regenerate, that the relation of sons con- 
tinues, that the sins of human frailty and daily incursion do 
not separate between them and God, since they are daily 
repented of, and, all the time, by the law- of the kingdom, 
forgiven. To all these assurances, these visible signs of for- 
giveness, they are entitled by their membership. No man 
has the right to refuse them. 

And of all these outward signs on earth of what is done 
in heaven, the Holy Communion is the great and supreme 
one. The others vary, and have varied, in different places 
and ages. This, established by the Lord, never varies. It 
is the one unalterable, visible declaration to all entitled to 
it, that their sins are forgiven. 

The early writers all teach us this view of Church mem- 
bership, — that forgiveness of sins belongs to it, that it is 
granted and assured in every means of grace. St. Jerome 
says : " By the word of God, the testimony of the Script- 
ures, and exhortations to virtues." 1 St. Augustine says: 
" By daily prayer," especially " the prayer of the faithful," — 
Our Father. St. Cyprian says : " By the blood of the Lord 
and the cup of salvation." 9 The meaning of it all is, that 
the Church is the household of the redeemed, that living 



8 Solvunt autem eos (i. e., peccatorum funes) Apostoli sermone Dei, et 
testimoniis Scripturarum, et exhortatione virtutum. — Hierom. in fesai. 
xiv. 17, p. 254. 

9 Epoto sanguine Domini, et poculo salutari exponatur memoria veteris 
hominis et fiat oblivio conversations pristinae saecularis; et maestum 
pectus ac triste, quod prius peccatis angentibus premebatur, divinae indul- 
gentiae laetitia resolvatur. — Cyp. Epist. lxiii. ad Caecilium. p. 279. 



The Church. 29 

membership in her is a state of forgiveness, and that to 
all the visible and sensible assurances of forgiveness she 
administers, every member has a right, and that, in every 
means of grace, the soul, with true repentance and true faith, 
is entitled to find and claim and appropriate to itself, the 
grace of forgiveness flowing from all. 



CHAPTER IV. 

EXCOMMUNICATION. 

THE Church of God, like every other society, must have 
the power of discipline. In her, however, this power 
must be spiritual. She can deal with men's souls only, — not 
with their bodies. It cannot affect their rights in life, in 
body, or in goods. 

The Holy Communion is the root and centre of her means 
of discipline, being the inmost mystery she administers, and 
participation in it being the evidence and the seal of mem- 
bership in her fold. Her final act of discipline can be only 
expulsion from her communion. She can only cast out the 
unworthy. Excommunication is therefore the ultimate pun- 
ishment for offences, as far as the visible Church can punish. 1 

We have said she is the kingdom of God, in which the 
law is forgiveness, and where the theory is that all are in the 
state of grace. Though imperfect and erring, yet the fact 
that they are pardoned remains, and for the remains of sin 
the means of grace afford assurance, to the repentant and 
faithful, of daily pardon. But there are sins which are high 
treason against the kingdom ; sins which forfeit the grace 
of pardon, which deliver a man over to the power of evil 
again ; sins for which there must be discipline ; sins that de- 
mand severer treatment, that the soul may be saved ; sins 
which are outrages on the Church's purity, on Christian 

1 Spirituali gladio superbi et contumaces resecantur, dum de ecclesia 
ejiciuntur. — Cyprian. Epist. lxii. ad Pompon. 



Excommunication. 3 1 

character, and on the soul. Those guilty of these sins were 
expelled from the Church. 

In the exercise of her discipline she rebuked sometimes, 
sometimes she suspended from her communion; but these 
were for faults of lighter dye. For great crimes, or for a 
sinful course persisted in against all rebuke and warning she 
had absolute expulsion. Her charter for this is found in the 
words of her Lord, in the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew's 
Gospel. 2 Here the case is provided for. The final act is 
to put the sinner out of Christian fellowship, to count him 
as "a heathen and a publican." 

St. Paul acts upon this charter in the case of the incestu- 
ous Corinthian. As we read in the fifth chapter of his First 
Epistle to the Corinthians, he had "judged already con- 
cerning him that hath so done this deed," and delivered him 
" unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit 
may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus ; " and he goes 
on to warn the Corinthian Church not to keep company so 
much as to eat with certain kinds of sinners, but " put away 
from among yourselves that wicked person." There is a 
like case in his First Epistle to St. Timothy, where he men- 
tions having excommunicated Hymenaeus and Alexander in 
the same way. 

This power of protecting herself from unworthy mem- 
bers, of vindicating her own purity and the honor of her 
Lord, of punishing notorious sinners by casting them out, 
was essential to the Church, and inheres in her as a body 

2 " Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him 
his fault between thee and him alone : if he shall hear thee, thou hast 
gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one 
or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may 
be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the 
Church : but if he neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an 
heathen man and a publican. Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall 
bind on earth shall he bound in heaven : and whatsoever ye shall loose on 
earth shall be loosed in heaven." 



32 Absolution. 

living under law. Her law is holiness, and when that law 
is outraged by those who have sworn to keep it, she is able 
to vindicate her mission on earth only by cutting them off 
from her fellowship. Accordingly, in the early Church, from 
the days of the Apostles, we find the Church exercising this 
power, — warning, suspending, and, at the last, expelling. 

" How severe is our discipline against offenders," writes 
Origen against Celsus, " especially against such as offend 
by incontinence, who are expelled from all communion with 
us. If the venerable institution of Pythagoras set up ceno- 
taphs for those departed from that philosophy, counting them 
as dead, so we bewail as lost and dead to God those over- 
come by lust or any other enormity." 3 

Tertullian, speaking of the same thing in his " Apology," 
says : " There also (in the Church) are exhortations, rebukes, 
and the Divine censure. For sentence is passed with the 
greatest gravity, and as if among those certain of the pres- 
ence of God, and it is the highest presumption of the future 
judgment that if any sin, he is cut off from, all communion 
of prayer, and of the assembly, and of every holy office." 4 

We do not care to multiply quotations. It is a case ad- 

3 7 Qia 6' egtXv dvTolg ayayfj ical nepl ajiapTavovTcov, ical fiaktara clkoTmo- 
TavSvruv, ovg aizE^avvovat rov kolvov oi Kara rbv ksActov irapan^ijcLOL Toig 
kv ralg ayopalg ra e7rcpp7jr6raTa eiriSeiKWfievolg ; teal to /llev tcov Hvdayo- 
peicov aejivbv dtdaGKaletov asvorcKpca tcov airooTavTcov Tijg crQcov cbi2ococj>lag 
Ka.Tecn<eva£e, loyi(,6jj,evov vsupovg avrovg yeyovevac ' ovtoi 6e cog a.7ro2.u2.6Tag 
nal TzQvrjKOTag tco de$ Tovg i>7r' aceXyeiag i] Tivog o,t6ttov veviKTjfievovg cog 
vsupovg rtevdovct ' nal cog ek vekdcov dvacT&VTEg, kav agio^oyov kvdsigcovTac 
fi£Ta/3o2?)v %p6vi{) ttXeiovi tcjv KaTap%dg EiaayojUEVcov vcTspov ttote npoaiEV- 
Tai ' Ecg bv8Efiiav dpxv v nal ixpoGTaaiav Tfjg %£yofj.£V7]g SKKAqcriag tov Oeov 
KaTaXkyovTeg Tovg cpddaavTag /ietol to rrpocJEfajXvdivai tco hdyco ETCTaiKEvau 
— Origen contra Celsum. Lib. iii. 

4 Ibidem etiam exhortationes, castigationes, et censura Divina. Nam 
et judicatur magno cum pondere, ut apud certos de Dei conspectu; sum- 
mumque futuri judicii praejudicium est, si quis ita deliquerit, ut a commu- 
nicatione orationis et conventus, et omnis sancti commercii relegetur. — 
TertulL Apolog. advers. Gent. cap. 39. 



Excommunication. $3 

mitted, that the primitive Church habitually exercised this 
power of excommunication. The fathers are full of it, and 
the councils command, define, and limit it. The occasion 
of one of the earliest and most notorious schisms, that of 
the Novatians, arose from the taking back of certain classes 
of offenders who had been expelled, classes which the Nova- 
tians claimed should never be restored. What we wish to 
inquire is, what the effect of this excommunication was sup- 
posed to be ? What happened when a man was excommu- 
nicated ? 

We must remember, in the first place, that excommuni- 
cation was not inflicted for light offences. It was the last 
weapon in the armory. It was used only against those whose 
sin was such as to argue treason against Jesus Christ the King ; 
sin such as cut the soul off from God ; such as amounted 
to abandonment of the Christian character. Such sin 
was some open breach of the plain Ten Commandments. 
The sixteenth book of Bingham's " Christian Antiquities " is 
taken up with an exhibition of ancient canons, showing the 
various breaches of the Commandments for which excom- 
munication was pronounced, and they cover all the " pre- 
sumptuous sins," the plain, undoubted transgressions of law 
of which men can be guilty. 

People falling into such sin, of whatever rank or station, 
were excluded from the communion of the faithful. The 
Church would not even admit them within her doors ; would 
not receive their offerings, or defile her altars with their 
oblations ; would not let their eyes behold her worship. 

Now, St. Paul's words, before quoted, will show us what 
was believed to occur when such sinners were excommuni- 
cated. They were believed to be "delivered unto Satan." 
In other words, the Church was the kingdom of God. The 
world was, to Christians, the kingdom of Satan. Within 
was pardon, mercy, the grace of God, the means of obtain- 
ing that grace. Outside were sin, temptation, dogs, sorcer- 
ers, — -evil and the power of evil. 

2* 



34 Absolution. 

It may seem strange to us, but this was the faith of the 
early Christians, as it is the doctrine of the New Testament. 
The kingdom of God was a reality. So also was the king- 
dom of Evil. Peace, pardon, absolution, in God's kingdom, 
were all realities. Evil, the power of evil, the deliverance 
over to evil, were all realities also. To call the world out- 
side the Church the kingdom "of Satan, was not, to an early 
Christian, to use a figure of speech. 

Expelled from the Church, he was expelled from all the 
means of grace, from all sacramental assurances of forgive- 
ness. He was put back into the evil kingdom from which 
he had fled at his baptism. He was cut off from all fellow- 
ship with what was good, from the one brotherhood where 
evil was opposed. His associates were heathens, misbeliev- 
ers, the aliens from God henceforth. The Church even cast 
his gifts out after him. She would not pollute herself with 
his offerings. 3 

5 In days of pious fairs, festivals, and lotteries, and especially in 
days when a godless " pew holder" sometimes is allowed to control a 
" church," it is strange enough to go back to the old rule on this matter : 

" A bishop must know whose gifts he ought to receive, and whose not. 
He shall not receive the gifts of fraudulent dealers. Neither shall he 
receive the gifts of whoremongers, nor the oblations of coveters and adul- 
terers, for the sacrifices of such are abomination to the Lord. Nor the 
oblations of such as afflict the widow and oppress the fatherless. . . . 
He shall also refuse all corrupters and lawyers that plead for injustice, 
and makers of idols, and thieves, and unrighteous publicans, and those 
that use frauds in weight or measure ; all murderers, and hangmen, and 
tmrighteous judges ; drunkards, blasphemers, usurers, and, in a word, every 
wicked man who lives in rebellion against God." — Apostolical Constitu- 
tions, Book IV. c. vi. 

There are men whose whole manner of life and method of business is 
an outrage on human and divine law and right, and yet these men are 
allowed, even begged and flattered, to give of their evil and accursed gains 
to holy uses. They seem to themselves to sanctify the whole by giving a 
part, and the religion that allows them so to do is conspiring to ruin them 
eternally. 

The fact that their whole life is accursed should be brought to them 



Excommunication. 35 

It was a terrible sentence, and was executed only on full 
knowledge and consideration. A man could not be excom- 
municated except he were regularly tried and convicted, or 
unless the sin were one of public notoriety, or unless he 
voluntarily confessed it. It was a sentence which could 
be pronounced only by the Bishop, and it was not a sen- 
tence which the Church originated. She considered her- 
self only doing, in the realm of the material what was done 
already in the world spiritual. The man had already ex- 
communicated himself. His sin against God, his treason 
against his king, had cut him off already. He had no part 
or lot in the kingdom of Grace. He was in it, indeed, while 
his sin was concealed, but not of it. 

The Church merely accepted the fact as she found it. 
She did not consider that her excommunication made the 
separation, but that her excommunication formally declared 
separation already existing. It was universally held that an 
unjust excommunication was no excommunication at all. 
What was claimed was that the Church, to guard herself 
from becoming a nest of unclean birds, to vindicate the in- 
sulted majesty of a merciful God, to mark her detestation of 
sin, to warn those for whose souls she watched, and to keep 



by the absolute refusal to permit any part of their ill-gotten wealth to 
pollute the altar of God. 

If the Church ever gets faith enough to stand again on divine and not 
worldly principles, she will find this bit of ancient discipline, which brands 
the evil gains of evil men with outspoken condemnation, to be one of the 
most powerful weapons of discipline in her hands. 

At present she is borrowing money on all hands from the devil to build 
altars to God, and the great trouble is, that the devil insists on security for 
principle and interest, and sometimes forecloses on his mortgage and takes 
the whole. If it were not for this, it might be some satisfaction to think 
one had cheated him out of his money for a good purpose. But he has 
never been easy to cheat, and looks sharply after every interest, church or 
charity, in which he has invested a dollar, and in due time claims his 
own. 



36 Absolution. 

the walls between a holy Church and an evil world secure, 
was bound, when she knew, in any way, of sin among her 
members, — marked and plain transgression of the plain law 
— to expel the sinner from her fellowship. 

She was not inquisitive to hunt for sins. She compelled 
no confession. She warned every man, and left it on his 
own conscience if he dared go on sacrilegiously using 
holy things while secretly living in sin. But when the case 
by any means became known to her, she arose and vindicated 
the majesty and purity of her law of holiness, — on Emperor 6 
and on slave equally. She led the transgressor to the door, 
and literally put him out of the Church into the place where 
he belonged. And excommunicated in one Church, he was 
excommunicated in all. 7 He could be restored to commun- 
ion again, as the canons testify, only in the Church where 
he had been excluded, because there was full knowledge of 
the case, and there all the facts were known. 

The multiplication of rival sects has destroyed discipline 
among Christians, at present, in many countries. If one 
sect rejects a man its rival, especially if he be a man of 
influence or wealth, stands only too eager to take him in. 
Among sects which claim only a human origin and authority 
excommunication means nothing more than the expulsion 
of a man from a social club. It has no terrors, and no dis- 
ciplinary power to bring a man to a sense of the enormity 
of his sins. It is no longer delivering him over to Satan, 
or, indeed, to anything which he fears. 

6 See the well-known story of the excommunication of the Emperor 
Theodosius the Great, by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and the humble 
submission of the Emperor to the censures of the Church. 

7 As a specimen of this : 

Placuit cunctis, ut ab eo episcopo quis accipiat communionem, a quo 
abstentus in crimine aliquo fuerit. Quod si alius episcopus praesumpserit 
eum admittere, illo adhuc minime faciente, vel consentiente, a quo fuerat 
communione privatus, sciat se hujusmodi causas inter fratres eum status sui 
periculo praestaturum. — Cone. Illiber. c. liii. 



Excommunication. 2>7 

It was far otherwise in the days of a Church which was 
one over all the world. Spiritual though the punishment 
was, and unsupported by any temporal pains or penalties, to 
the faith that grasped the reality of spiritual things it was 
very real and terrible. The branding of his sin by the 
Church was the visible sign of what took place in the court 
of heaven, and the casting him out for it from fellow- 
ship below was taken to be only the earthly type of what 
was done in heaven. The man's sins came back upon him 
to crush him. He had broken the contract on which they 
were forgiven. He had right no longer to the daily assur- 
ance of forgiveness given in the word and doctrine and 
sacraments. They were all to him empty forms. He was 
making a mock of them while he remained within. 

So the startling precision of a pronounced excommuni- 
cation declared his position. It fell upon him like a voice 
from heaven. And like Adam after the fall, he was driven 
out of the garden into the wilderness, and a naming sword 
drove him back from access to "the tree of life," the altar 
of the Lord. 



CHAPTER V. 

PENITENCE. 

BUT God's mercy never forsakes a man while living. 
And the Church, administering the law of God, can- 
not forsake him either. She smites that she may heal. Even 
in her heaviest infliction she thinks only of the sinner's well- 
being. Her blows fall in mercy, not in wrath, and she 
yearns with a mother's heart over the children she must 
punish. So, when St. Paul had written to the Church at 
Corinth to excommunicate the incestuous member, and com- 
manded them "not to keep company with such an one, no, 
not so much as to eat," about a year after, when the excom- 
munication had wrought its effect, writes to the same Church 
his Second Epistle, to take the person back and " comfort 
him, lest he be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow." 

Following Apostolic example, the purpose and hope of 
the Church in all her discipline, even the severest, was to 
bring the sinner back again to repentance. The man put 
out of the fold was not hopeless. He might return. The 
Church, unlike the Novatian schismatics, held that there 
was restoration, even for the worst offenders. But the road 
was a hard and painful one, and arranged to test his con- 
stancy and sincerity by the severest tests. 

His first step was to be " admitted to penance," — to be 
allowed to enter upon this road. He made his appearance 
at the church door, which he was not allowed to enter. He 
besought " the faithful," as they passed into those courts 
from which he was shut out, to intercede for him. With 



Penitence. 39 

every sign of sorrow and a broken heart he pleaded that he 
might be allowed to become a penitent and admitted to un- 
dergo " the discipline." 

If his sin was peculiarly atrocious he was allowed to make 
these supplications for months, and sometimes for years, 
without an answer. He and those like him — cast out and 
seeking to be put upon the road to return, but not yet ad- 
mitted — were "the mourners," or "weepers," as the word 
was, sheltering under the shadow of the church porch, but 
not allowed to enter, although the heathen were. But on the 
sincerely expressed desire — at once in most cases probably, 
sooner or later even in the worst — the sinner was put on his 
course of discipline. He was admitted inside the church 
doors, and placed in the lowest place, among the heathen, 
the heretics, the Jews, and the unbelievers, and was dismissed 
when the services fit for such to hear were ended, with a 
prayer for his pardon, and that he might sincerely repent 
and be restored to the favor of God. 

When thus admitted he took his rank among "the 
penitents." The bishop was the officer to admit him, to 
decide the length of time he must continue in that class, 
according to the gravity of his offence, and he was sol- 
emnly put upon his probation, by prayer and the imposition 
of hands. 

Before the whole congregation he stood a sinner con- 
fessed, in the place of the penitent and in a penitential garb. 
The particular crime for which he was doing penance might 
not be known. He might publicly confess it if he chose, or 
it might be already a notorious thing. But though known 
to the bishop, of course, it was not thought wise or proper 
always to publish it to the world. Bat that it was some 
great and grievous crime any man coming into the church 
could see. 

'' Those whom you see," says St. Augustine, " perform- 
ing penance have committed gross sins (see/era), adultery, 
or such enormities, whence they do penance. For, if 



4-0 Absolution. 

their sins were light, daily prayer would suffice to atone 
for them." 1 

This was called the exomologesis, or public penance, done 
before the eyes of all men to attest the sinner's sincerity in 
his repentance, his hatred and abhorrence of his crimes, his 
humility and heart-broken sorrow. How different it is from 
the huddled-up "penances " which are done in the Church of 
Rome, how different from the whispered confessions and the 
concealment there, which makes the confessional a sanctuary 
of sin, and the priest a particeps criminis with the sinner, we 
need not stop to emphasize. It is seen at a glance. Every 
public assembly in the ancient Church distinguished between 
its penitents and its faithful communicants. A man was in 
one class or in the other. He had a right to go to the Holy 
Table and receive the sacrament of the Body and Blood, or 
he had not. If he had not, it was known publicly, and he 
publicly confessed to the whole brotherhood that he was 
guilty of some grevious sin by the very place he occupied in 
the church, and by being publicly dismissed before the Com- 
munion service began. " Thou hearest the deacon stand- 
ing up and saying, 'As many as are under penance depart,' ' 
says Chrysostom. 2 This confession or exo?nologesis was made 
day in and out, not to the ears of a priest in a closet, but to 
the whole body of the faithful. Absolution was given, not 
on the instant, by a priest, in private, but after months or 
years of trial, by the bishop, with solemn prayers and suppli- 
cations, publicly, before all the brethren. 

1 Illi enim, quos videtis agere poenitentiam, scelera commiserant, aut 
adulteria, aut aliqua facta immania; inde agunt poenitentiam nam si levia 
peccata ipsorum essent, ad haec quotidiana oratio delenda sumceret. — Atig. 
De Symbolo, lib. I, cap. 7. 

2 'Aicovetg earurog rov K^pvKog^ nal Xeyovrog, "Oaot ev fieravoia arceX- 
6sre ' rravreg, ogol jirj fierexovciv, ev fieravoia elaiv ' el ruv ev fieravoia el, 
uere%eZv oiiic b&ecXeig ' b yap fi?) fierexuv, £v fieravoia earl ' rivoa ovv evenev 
?ih/ei, 'A7re?i6ere ol fii) dwdfievoi detjQfjvai ; av de eo~r?jKag Irafiug ; a/.7J ovn 
el rovrov, aXka rcbv dwafievov fierexetv, nal ovdev (ppovri^etg ; ovdev rjyrj 
rb Troayfia. — Chrysos. Horn. iii. Eph. 



Penitence. 4 1 

We do not stop to speak of the various stages in the 
course through which a man passed to reach the Communion 
table again. There were special prayers, for the penitents 
in that stage in which they spent most of their probation, 
said over them, while humbly kneeling, just before the Com- 
munion service proper, after which they were dismissed 
out of the church, — communicants only remaining at Com- 
munion. There were some special observances also con- 
nected with the penitents during Lent. But, as we see, the 
whole matter was public. In the ordinary lives of this class 
of her erring children, the Church looked for greater strict- 
ness and devotion. They were expected to abstain from all 
innocent amusements and gayeties ; to live quiet and retired ; 
to make the period of their punishment indeed a continuous 
Lent. 

The bishop had it in his hands to shorten the term, for 
good cause. A man might show more than ordinary zeal; 
he might risk his life in nursing brethren in a plague; he 
might impoverish himself by giving of his goods to the poor ; 
he might be in times of persecution imprisoned, or tortured, 
or even called to die for the faith ; and in the trial might 
show exemplary steadfastness. In all such cases, when sin- 
cerity and hearty earnestness were proved by acts indepen- 
dent of the exomologesis or public confession, the bishop, nat- 
urally, would use his discretionary power, and shorten the time 
of probation. This shortening was called "an indulgence." 
The Church of Rome has transferred the word to her pre- 
tended shortening of the pains of a pretended Purgatory? 
and her advocates are apt to confound the unwary by citing 
these early indulgences — the shortening of the time of eccle- 
siastical discipline — as if they were examples of the vain 
inventions she calls indulgences now. 

What was the purpose of this long and painful and 
humiliating course ? Evidently, it was not to win pardon 
from God. The early Church had no view of human merit 
which could induce her to put men on this course for that 



4 2 Absolution. 

purpose. She held that a man was pardoned on repentance ; 
pardoned at once, no matter how great and grievous might 
be his sin. She did not doubt that the very mourners whom 
she, as yet, refused allowance to enter her doors were ab- 
solved by the Lord, their Saviour, if they were sincere. 
Even those whom, at times, for some atrocious crime she 
refused her outward communion entirely, she still taught 
would be, if sincere, forgiven by God. 

That she did not consider this exercise of penitence as 
the means of obtaining Divine pardon is clear from her com- 
mon habit, declared in various canons, of admitting every 
one of these penitents to communion when in danger of 
death, although, upon recovery, she required them to begin 
where they had been, and finish the regular course. The 
course of penance was not to satisfy God, but to satisfy her. 
God knows the heart and at once forgives the truly contrite. 
But the Church does not know the heart. She can only go 
upon visible facts and things. In truth, a man does not even 
know his own heart. Not only others, but the man himself, 
requires to be assured of the sincerity of his repentance by 
the translation of words into acts, and emotions into life. 

The exomologesis was, therefore, to assure the Church 
of the penitent's sincerity, and also to assure the penitent 
himself. But still more. It was appointed to indicate the 
Church's horror and shame at his sin, to mark her detesta- 
tion — faint image on earth of God's detestation in heaven — 
of wrong and sin, and particularly of wrong and sin done by 
Christian men inside the Christian fold, who had denied 
their vows, outraged their position, trampled under foot the 
blood of the Covenant, and shamed the Lord before His 
enemies. 

When death threatened, the pitiful mother's heart, beat- 
ing responsive to the pitiful heart of Christ, would restore 
the penitent and give him the Communion, his viaticum, or 
food for the road, as he entered on the downward path 
through the dark valley ; but should he recover, he found the 



Penitence. 43 

stately mother again demanding the visible proof of his sin- 
cerity in continued penitence and humility, till the days of 
his trial were fulfilled. 

When those days were accomplished the penitent was 
solemnly admitted to communion. This occurred generally 
at Easter, after the prayer and fasting of Lent. On each 
Ash-Wednesday, it was a common custom to turn out of the 
Church solemnly, with penitential psalms and prayer, the 
whole number of the penitents, as a symbolic representation 
of Adam's expulsion from Paradise, and solemnly to lead 
them in again, and then to offer up supplications for them, 
humbly kneeling, that God would grant them a sincere re- 
pentance and the grace to make a good and humble confes- 
sion. For some each Lent would be the last in their course. 
They would be looking forward to the joys of Easter, doubly 
joyful to them, because on that high festival they would be 
restored to the visible means of grace. Now, this restoration 
was their absolution. The last act in this discipline was only 
an act which had occurred at its beginning, and frequently 
throughout the whole course. When the time was ended 
the penitent was solemnly prayed over, as he had been all 
along, and the bishop laid his hands upon him in prayer for 
God's mercy. 

There is not a trace in all the early Church of any form 
save this. There was no "absolution," as far as absolution 
is contained in a form of words, which was supposed to ab- 
solve him. He was admitted to the communion from which 
he had been expelled, and that admission was his absolution. 
"The peace of the Church," as it was called, was granted 
when he received the Eucharist. The act of receiving it 
was so well understood to be the granting of the "peace," 
that the two phrases are used interchangeably. For, as 
we said before, the theory is that the Church contains 
the saved. She grants to all within her, daily, the sacra- 
mental assurance of salvation, of mercy and pardon. The 
man under discipline was refused all such assurances. He 



44 Absolution. 

had no part nor lot in them. They belonged to the faithful. 
She had, in her exercise of " the power of the keys," opened 
the gates of the earthly kingdom of heaven, and turned 
him out. 

And now she exercises the same power, and opens the 
gates, and brings him in. He is restored to the privileges he 
had forfeited, to all the means of grace, to all the assurances 
of salvation, to all the visible declarations in word, prayer, 
doctrines, and sacraments of the Church of God. As the 
putting him out was the binding of his sins ministerially, so 
the bringing him in was the loosing of them ministerially. 
The form by which he was restored was a matter of indiffer- 
ence. It was the restoration itself which was the single 
point of importance. It was the restoration itself which was 
his visible and sacramental absolution, because it brought 
him again into the kingdom whose law is absolution. 

And this was the second great exercise of the power of 
the keys, as baptism was the first. Both had reference to the 
opening and the closing of the kingdom of heaven. As sins 
were forgiven, and a man introduced into the kingdom of 
mercy in the first place by baptism, so if he fell and was 
turned out, he could be restored to the same kingdom by 
this course of discipline, and commonly only once, in primitive 
days. 

But the absolution, we wish it distinctly noted, was 
not in any particular form of words, or any special assurance, 
but essentially in the fact that the gates were opened, and he 
was brought in and placed at the Lord's Table. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE OFFICER OF DISCIPLINE. 

WE have spoken of excommunication and of restora- 
tion. The question arises, in whose hands was this 
administration ? There are three orders of ministers in the 
Church. Was this a duty common to them all, or was it 
reserved to some one especially ? Could a deacon excom- 
municate or absolve ? Could a priest ? 

The answer, distinct and clear, is that discipline was in 
the hands of the bishop exclusively. He might employ a 
priest, a deacon, or even a layman, as his agent or messenger, 
but he was himself the executive authority, the officer to 
administer the laws of the Church, with the advice in this 
respect, as of course in all, of his clergy and laity. The 
bishop excommunicated — was under penalties if he did not 
excommunicate — certain evil livers. The purity and honor 
of the Church were in his hands. He was set to watch for 
them and to guard them. The bishop decided whether or 
not a man so excommunicated should be admitted to disci- 
pline, — to the exomologesis, or public penance. Having ad- 
mitted him, the bishop decided how long he should thus 
remain, — appointed the length of his probation, and, for 
causes, granted him an "indulgence," as it was called. And 
finally, when the discipline had been completed, it was the 
bishop who solemnly, at the altar on Good-Friday, pro- 
nounced the penance fulfilled, and by solemn prayer and 
imposition of hands restored the penitent to the Holy Com- 
munion. 



46 Absolution. 

In answering this question, the learned Bingham says : 
" That all the power of discipline was primarily lodged in 
the hands of the bishop, as all other offices of the Church, 
is a matter uncontested, and evident from the whole forego- 
ing history and account of the practice of the Church." 

And, with reference to the same question, Marshall, in 
his " Penitential Discipline," says : " The answer is short 
and clear, that the bishop was the person entrusted with 
it (the power of discipline and absolution), that his powers 
were discretionary, as the various practices of various 
Churches sufficiently prove, and that all authority in these 
matters was originally derived from him, whoever might 
occasionally be allowed to exercise it under him." 

With reference to this we need only mention the fact that 
the ancient canons of ancient councils, which prescribe the 
sins for which excommunication shall issue, and the length 
of time which shall be required for their public confession, 
always lay the duty of their execution upon the bishop. 

" Let the bishop look carefully over all. Let him con- 
sider his dignity, that he is endowed with the power of 
binding and loosing," say the "Apostolical Constitutions." 
Again : " To you bishops is it said, Whatsoever ye shall bind 
on earth, shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever ye shall 
loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven." 1 And again: 
" He defiles his diocese, the Church, and the house of God," 
they tell him, if he neglect to cut off offenders. 2 

Yet this was a power which, in some of its parts and in 

1 Tvopl^OV) 0) ETTiaKOTTE, 70V Tpb'KOV GOV KOI TT)V h^iaV C)Q &EOV TVTTOV 

EX U>V ' £V avdpcjirotg, r<f) irdvruv apx^LV avSpuTzuv tepuv, fiacuAeov, ap%6vTcjv 
.... Kal ovrog ev EKKArjaia nade^ov rbv ?\,6yov noiovfiEvog, ug egovaiav 
ex^v KplvELV rovg q/japrqKdrag ' ore vfi.lv roig ErricniSTrotg siprjTaL ' b kav 
dfjorjTE ekI rijg yqg, iarai dede/uEvov kv tG> ovpavCt ' Kal b eo,v Avotjte etzI 
rrjg yfjg larat Aeav/hevov ev rco ovpavfi. — Apost. Constit. lib. ii. cap. n. 

2 Ovrog kfiEfirjAuoE Kal rr/v oiKEiav agtav, Kal rrjv rov 6eov EKKAT/claV) tt)v 
Kara r^v izapoiKiav dvrov. — Ibid. lib. ii. cap. io. 



The Officer of Discipline. 47 

certain emergencies, the bishop might delegate to others. 
But the very canons which permit this vindicate the authority 
of the bishop as the officer of discipline most clearly. 

The second Council of Carthage declares : " To reconcile 
penitents in the public service is not allowed to presbyters." 3 
But immediately after it enacts, " If any one be in danger of 
death, and shall have sought to be reconciled to the divine 
altar, if the bishop be absent, the presbyter shall consult the 
bishop, and reconcile the sick person according to his pre- 
cept." 4 

Again, the third council of Carthage enacts, "A presbyter, 
the bishop not being consulted, shall not restore a penitent, 
unless the bishop be absent, and the necessity urgent." 5 

The matter, as is clear from the citations, was in the 
hands of the bishop as the responsible officer. The Church 
looked to him to carry out her laws and guard the purity of 
the flock. But he had large discretion under the law. He 
could decide, in any individual case, whether or not the 
rigor of the law might not be mitigated. In ordinary cases 
he acted personally. He admitted publicly, and publicly 
reconciled or absolved penitents. But the Church, like her 
Master, is pitiful. She has the heart of a mother, — not of a 
tyrant. The bishop might be absent, sick, infirm, in banish- 
ment, or in prison ; or a penitent might be taken with sudden 
danger of death, and the bishop could not attend. In such 
cases the bishop was authorized to act largely under the law 
of Christian charity. He might give a general authority in 
all such cases to his presbyters to act in his stead. Or he 

3 Reconciliare quemquam in publica missa, presbytero non licere, hoc 
omnibus placet. — Concil. Carth. II. c. iii. 

4 Si quisquam in periculo fuerit constitutus, et se reconciliare divinis 
altaribus petierit, si episcopus absens fuerit, debet utique presbyter con- 
sulere episcopo, et sic periclitantem ejus praecepto reconciliare. — Ibid, 
c. iv. 

5 Presbyter, inconsulto episcopo, non reconciliet poenitentem, nisi 
absente episcopo, et necessitate cogente. — Ibid. III. c. xxxii. 



48 Absolution. 

might authorize some of them, and not others ; or he might 
give authority to a special person in a special case. 

Indeed, he might not only give such authority to priests, 
but even to deacons. St. Cyprian does this in Epistle xiii. : 
" If penitents shall be taken with any sudden dangerous sick- 
ness, our presence not being waited for, to any presbyter who 
shall be present, or if no presbyter be at hand, and their de- 
parture begins to approach, to a deacon they shall make 
confession {exojtiologesis) of their sins, that they may receive 
imposition of hands in penitence, and go to God in peace." 6 

But not only might a priest or deacon be the agent and 
messenger of the bishop in reconciling the penitent and giv- 
ing him " the peace of the Church," but even a layman, or a 
boy. Such is the story told by Eusebius, out of Dionysius 
of Alexandria, about the Eucharist being sent to Serapion, 
when he was dying, by the hand of his servant. 7 

There was a certain ground for these extensions of the 
ordinary law in the practice of the early Church, as can be 
easily seen on reflection. That practice was to grant recon- 
ciliation to the communion of the Church, publicly, in the 
Church. As the confession and penance had been public, 
so the absolution was public. It was something in which the 
Church, as a corporation, joined. As baptism, which admit- 
ted a man in the first place into the fold, was a public ser- 
vice, so penance and absolution, which restored him to that 
fold after he had been expelled, were public also, — things in 
which the whole Church joined. The bishop, in one sense, 
was but acting in the name of and for the Church in receiv- 
ing the penitent. It appears from St. Cyprian that, in the 

6 Si incommodo aliquo et infirmitatis periculo occupati fuermt (poeni- 
tentes) ; non expectata praesentia nostra, apud presbyterum quemcumque 
praesentem, vel si presbyter repertus non fuerit, et urgere exitus coeperit, 
apud diaconum quoque exomologesin facere delicti sui possint : ut manu 
eis in poenitentia imposita, veniant ad Dominum cum pace. — Cyprian. 
Epist. xiii. 

Etisebius, lib. vi. cap. xlv. 



The Officer of Discipline. 49 

solemn act of restoration, the bishop and clergy joined in 
laying hands upon the penitent. " No one," says he, " shall 
be admitted to come to Communion unless hands shall first 
have been laid upon him by the bishop and clergy."* 

This being the practice, it seems natural enough that 
in pressing emergencies the act of declaring the penitent 
restored to the fellowship of Christ might, by the bishop's 
authority, be performed by those who joined with him in the 
act of ordinary occasions. Indeed, it appears to have been 
a standing principle in the early Church, that whenever death 
was threatening, any man, who had been admitted to public 
penance, should be reconciled by any priest who might be 
called, and should receive from his hands the Holy Com- 
munion. The Church, if she errs at all, should err on the 
side of mercy. The dying penitent was to receive his viati- 
cum — the refreshment for his journey — although, if he re- 
covered, he was placed among the penitents again to go 
through his regular course. 

But the law is not for extraordinary cases. Startling ex- 
ceptions, which are provided for by uncommon means, do 
not make a rule. And the law and rule was that the bishop, 
acting in this, as in all, under the law of his position, and 
with the counsel of his clergy and laity, was the ordinary 
officer of discipline. In his hands were the keys, even in 
baptism. Priests and deacons acted under his allowance, 
and, as it were, by a delegated authority. But in this exer- 
cise of this power of the keys he was, ordinarily, the actor 
personally. 

The principle is clearly recognized, and the power of 
primitive tradition, where primitive discipline has ceased, 
is clearly shown in the rubric before the Communion Ser- 
vice, in the Prayer Book. There the minister who " repels " 

8 Nee ad communicationem venire quis possit nisi prius illi ab episcopo 
et clero manus fuerit impositae. — Cyprian. Epist. xvi. Hoc in loco confer. 
Idem, Epist. xv.-xvii. passim. 

3 



50 Absolution. 

any one from Holy Communion for notorious evil living, is 
not permitted to settle the matter for himself, but is instructed 
to " give notice thereof to the ordinary (the bishop) as soon 
as conveniently may be." 

The power of excommunication, by the laws and princi- 
ples of the primitive Church, was not in the hands of the 
priests. The power of absolution — the taking off of excom- 
munication — was not in the hands of priests either. The 
doing of either, by priests, as a part of their ordinary func- 
tion, is a complete reversal of the primitive theory and prac- 
tice. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PRIVATE CONFESSION. 

WE have said, what is on ail hands conceded, that the 
bishop was the officer of discipline. Indeed, on 
this principle is founded the whole canon law on the subject 
of confession and absolution, and the limitations of their exer- 
cise, even in the Church of Rome, as one may see from Van 
Espen. 

We have seen that in the primitive Church this discipline 
was a public affair, and that when the ancients speak of exo- 
mo/ogesis, they mean this public confession and public abso- 
lution as we have explained it. But, besides this, it is true 
there were private confessions made to individual priests. 
We propose to examine into the nature of these. 

First of all we would say that we are told by the two 
ecclesiastical historians, Socrates ' and Sozomen, 2 that, in the 
Church of Constantinople, and some others, after the Decian 
persecution, those who had fallen from the faith were so 
many that it was an intolerable burden for the bishops, with 
all their other duties, to examine into and decide upon each 
individual case liable to discipline. Therefore, to assist him 
in this work, the bishop selected some prudent, reticent, and 
grave priest, whose business it was to hear confessions, — the 
penitentiary priest. To him were to resort all whose con- 
sciences were burdened with any weight of guilt. He heard 
the story, and if the case was one which demanded a public 

1 Book V. chap. xix. 2 Book VII. chap. xvi. 



52 Absolution. 

penance, the performance of the exomologesis, he dismissed 
the penitent to that duty. If, on the other hand, the sins 
confessed were not such as render the penitent liable to 
legal penance, the priest gave him such advice and direction 
as in his judgment were needed, and himself " absolved " 
him, that is, declared him entitled, without the penitential 
discipline, to the privileges of the faithful. 

This office, they tell us, continued in the see of Constan- 
tinople down to the time of Nectarius, the predecessor of 
Chrysostom, by whom it was abolished on occasion of a scan- 
dal which the penitentiary, with too great zeal, allowed to be 
published. 

From the account of the historians it appears that this 
office had direct relation to the public penitential discipline 
which we have here described. It was not established to 
destroy that discipline, but to facilitate its administration. It 
did not remove it, it only aided to carry it out. On finding 
an inconvenience attached to it the office was abolished, but 
the discipline nevertheless still continued, as is seen by what 
we have before cited from St. Chrysostom, who came into the 
see immediately after its discontinuance. 

In one sense, therefore, we can scarcely call the confes- 
sion made to the penitentiary priest a private confession. 
He was simply the bishop's agent in this part of the bishop's 
work, and was to conduct matters, not according to his own 
notion, but strictly according to the canons ; and those can- 
ons required, for the sins which cut a man off from commun- 
ion, public penance and public release. 

When the office was abolished matters went back to their 
original condition. The bishop took the work upon himself 
again, and there were still confession, discipline, and public 
reconciliation, as of old. But there were certain other cases 
in which men were urged, of old, and should still be urged, 
to make confessions. 

Men were advised by the ancient writers, when under 
any perplexities of mind or conscience, or burdened by any 



Private Confession. 53 

sense of guilt which would not lift, to go to the priest for 
counsel and advice, and, in the words of the Prayer Book, 
"open their grief." 

In this way St. Basil advises the confession of sins, " be- 
cause a physician, in order to cure bodily diseases, must be 
told the symptoms and the cause, and men do not tell these 
to all, but to them skilled in healing ; so confession of sins 
should be made to those skilful to heal, as it is written, ' Ye 
who are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak.' " 3 

There was still another reason for making such confidants 
of strong spiritual men, namely, that they might decide 
whether there was need of making confession in its technical 
sense, that is, undergoing the exomologesis . 

"Try first," says Origen, "the physician to whom thou 
art to reveal the cause of thy distemper, and see that he be 
one who knows how to be weak with one that is weak, and 
to weep with one that weeps ; who understands the discipline 
of condoling and pitying ; that so, at length, if he who hath 
first showed himself a merciful and skilful physician, shall 
say anything and give thee any counsel, thou mayest follow it. 
If he discerns thy sickness to be such as ought to be set out 
and cured in the public assembly of the Church, and thus 
others be edified and thyself healed, this is to be done with 
great deliberation, and with the well-skilled counsel of such 
a physician." 4 

3 'H k§a}'6psvcic ruv dfiaprj/udauv tovtov ex ei ~^ v %-oyov, bv e^ei i) 
eTTidetgig ruv aofiarcKuv rraduv, cjg ovv rd Tzddr] rov cujiaroq oh tzclglv atzo- 
KaA{"KTovcLv oi avdpwTToi, ovte roiq tv^ovgiv, a/J.a rolg eju.rreipoic rr'c roiruv 
OepaTeiar ' ovtcj koI tj k^ayopevGig ruv dfiapr^udruv ylveafiai 6pel?.ei errt 
Ttjv dwa/ievov depcnreveiv, Kara rb ysypa/uuivov, 'Yfteig oi dwaroi, rd 
ac6evi]jiara tojv ddvvarcjv fSaard^erej Tovriarij alpere did r?;c e~if2E/^£iag. — 
Basil t7i Regul. brevioribus, Resp. 229. 

^ Tantummodo circumspice diligentius cui debeas confiteri peccatum 
tuum. Proba prius medicum cui debeas causam languoris exponere; qui 
sciat infirmari cum infirmante, flere cum flente, qui condolendi et compa- 
tiendi noverit disciplinam : ut ita demum si quid ille dixerit, qui se prius 



54 Absolution. 

These cases of private confession were like those pro- 
vided for in the appointment of the penitentiary priest. A 
man went voluntarily and sought spiritual help and counsel 
in spiritual loneliness and weakness. He confessed his con- 
dition, that he whose advice he sought might judge of what 
was necessary to be done. If it were necessary for him to 
make the confession, if his sin was such as cut him off 
from communion, he was advised of that, and directed 
to put himself among the confessed penitents. If his case 
did not require this treatment, he received the advice and 
the prayers of his counsellor. 

But there were two cases in which private confession was 
urged where there was no reference to the public discipline 
of penitence. 

St. James writes : " Confess your sins one to another, and 
pray for one another, that ye may be healed." 

The ancients interpret this in its plain meaning, that 
Christian men should confess mutually to each other and 
pray mutually for each other. They do not connect it, as 
the Romanists do, with priestly confession or priestly abso- 
lution. 

Hincmar, in the ninth century, writes : " Our light and 
daily sins, according to the exhortation of St. James, are 
daily to be confessed to those that are our equals ; and such 
sins, we may believe, will be cleansed by their prayers and 
our acts of piety, if with a charitable mind it is truly said, 
' Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.' " 5 

et eruditum medicum ostenderit et misericordem, si quid consilii dederit, 
facias et sequaris ; si intellexerit et praeviderit talem esse languorem tuum 
qui in conventu totius Ecclesiae exponi debeat et curari, ex quo fortassis et 
caeteri aedificari poterunt, et tu ipse facile sanari, multa hoc deliberatione, 
et satis perito medici illius consilio procurandum est. — Origen, Ps. xxxvii. 
Horn. ii. 

5 Quotidiana leviaque peccata, secundam Jacobi Apostoli hortamen- 
tum, alterutrum coaequalibus confitenda sunt. Quae quotidiana eorum 
©ratione cum quotidianis ™is actibus credenda sunt mundari, si cum benig- 



Private Confession. 55 

The other instance of private confession was when a man 
had done an injury to another. It was held according to 
the teaching of our Lord that he should leave his gift before 
the altar, and first be reconciled to his brother by confessing 
the injury, and asking to be reconciled. 

While, therefore, we may safely say that in the early 
Church Christians were advised for their souls' health to 
counsel, in any doubt or difficulty or temptation, those who 
could help them and enlighten them ; while they were ex- 
horted not to conceal their sins, but to lay them open before 
their brethren, and especially before their pastors ; yet such 
confessions had nothing to do with what is called sacramen- 
tal confession, and that even they were only matters of ad- 
vice, and not of obligation ; for the men that advise such 
confessions are just as emphatic on the necessity of confes- 
sion only to God. 

" What have I to do with men," says Augustine, " that they 
should hear my confessions as if they could cure all my sick- 
nesses? " 6 

" Tears wash away the sin," says Ambrose, " that it is a 
shame to confess with the voice." 7 

" I do not bid thee bring thy sin on the stage, or accuse 
thyself to others," says Chrysostom. 8 "Reveal thy way unto 
the Lord; confess thy sins before God." Again: "Dost 



nitate mentis in oratione Dominica veraciter dicitur, Dimitte nobis debita 
nostra, sicut et nos remittimus debitoribus nostris. — Hincmar. Epist. ad 
Hildeboldum torn. ii. n. I. 

6 Quid mihi ergo est cum hominibus ut audiant confessiones meas, 
quasi ipsi sanaturi sint omnes languores meos? — Aug. in Co?ifess. lib. x. 
cap. 3. 

7 Lavant lachrymae delictum quod voce pudor est conntere. — Ambrose, 
lib. x. cap. 22, Com. in Luc. 

8 Ov ?>eycj (to/, ktcrrouTTEvcov acavrbv, ovde rrapa role aX/.oig Karrjy6pT]Gov 
a?2a irefflecdcu (avuj3ov?Jvu) TC)7rpo(pT/ry Iejcvtl, 'AKOKalvtyov rrpoc Kvptov 
ttjv SSov cgv ' km tov 6eov ravra 6uo?.6}7]cov.~ Chrysos. Horn. xxxi. in 
Heb. 



5 6 Absolution. 

thou confess thy sins to thy fellow servant ? Thou only 
showest thy wound to Him who is thy lord, and He says to 
thee, Confess thy sins to me in private, to me alone, that I 
may heal thy wound and deliver thee from thy grief." 9 

"I confess not with my lips," said Basil, "but inwardly 
in my heart where no eye sees. To Thee alone, who seest 
in secret, do I declare my groanings." 10 

We take it that no one will suppose that by such declar- 
ations as these the writer meant to teach men that the dis- 
cipline which we have described, and which they as bishops 
put into exercise, according to the canons, was unscriptural 
or useless. That discipline required confession, and a pub- 
lic confession too. 

In using such expressions as we have quoted they must 
have meant that it was unnecessary to confess, except to 
God, those sins of " daily incursion " for which daily prayer 
and daily repentance were the remedy. They were address- 
ing people in the full communion of the faithful, and who 
had the right to be there ; those to whom belonged the 
promises and the assurances of forgiveness ; those who lived 
under the law of pardon, and who clung to their Lord by a 
living faith and a living repentance. Such had no need to 
fly to man. They should be strong enough in judgment and 
clear enough in conscience to trust their souls alone, under 
the laws of His kingdom, and using His means of grace. 
They were addressing strong Christian men, who were 
bravely fighting the battle with their sins, in faith and hope. 

But all were not strong. There were the weak, and they 



9 M?) yap r<3 cvvdovTiu 6/u.oloyEig ; . . . rep fieciroTr), ~£> Kr/de/ioviy rw 
(firtiavdpuKojy rib iarpo) to rpav/xa kirideiKvi'tig "... tyrjolv u ejjloI to d/xap- 
Tt//J.a elive fiovcj naf idcav iva 6epa7revcu) to k7.Kog nal aKaTJiat-u rrjg bdvvqg." 
— Chrysos. Horn. iv. De Lazar. 

10 Ov yap Iva To'ig noA/.olg (pavepbg ylvcj/iai, rolg x £ ' L ^ eaiv ££ofj,o2,oyovftai t 
evdov de kv avry r/y napSta to b/Ltfia fivuv col /j.6voi to) ^"keTzovrt ra kv 
tcpvKTCfi Tovg kv knavTifi arevay/xovg ETrideinvvu, — Basil, in Ps. xxxviii. 



Private Confession. 57 

had their infirmities. There were those beaten down in the 
battle ; not wounded merely, but sorely wounded ; trampled 
down in the rush of the evil hosts. These they advised to 
cry for help, not to God only, but also to man ; to ask succor 
of the strong; to seek a comrade's hand to hold them up, a 
comrade's breast to lean on, a braver and stronger fellow- 
soldier to drag them from the trampling feet of their spiritual 
enemies. 

So the apparent contradiction is, like many another con- 
tradiction, none at all when we understand it. Men, to sus- 
tain opposing views, snatch texts and authorities from this side 
and that, and hurl them at each other, mutually destructive, 
when there is no opposition at all, if they would but consider 
the different ends aimed at and the different persons ad- 
dressed. 

The writers of the early Church taught that a Christian 
man should stand upon the grand freedom of his new birth- 
right and on the power of his adoption, should boldly come to 
his Lord with all his weakness and his sins, should consciously 
live under the law of salvation and grace, and should claim 
the rights of a son under that law. That is the Christian 
position forevermore. The steadfast heart, the faithful soul 
of a redeemed freeman in Christ, a loving member of Christ's 
kingdom, has a right to the position. 

But these same writers knew, also, that all named with 
the name of Christ are not strong with this strength, or free 
with this freedom. They are in the kingdom to be helped, 
these weak and failing ones. And these must be told they 
have the right to the help of their brethren. " Comfort the 
feeble-minded, support the weak," cries the Apostolic voice 
from of old. To whom does it come so strongly as to the 
priests and pastors of the flock ? Can those of faint hearts 
and feeble knees do better than to turn for aid to those who 
are set to watch for them for the Lord ? 

But there are not only the feeble who need help, and the 
sick who need healing ; there are also the false and the faith- 
3* 



58 Absolution. 

less ; the traitors who have denied their Lord, the souls that 
have made shipwreck of the faith. 

These need to confess, not to God only, but to men. 
They owe it to the Lord whom they have shamed before 
His enemies, and to His Church which they have disgraced, 
to confess and bewail their treason. Therefore, the same 
bishop who preaches to the faithful and true soul that con- 
fession need be made to the Lord alone, and to the faithful 
but weak and true soul that it were wise for it to take a 
spiritual physician and confess to some faithful priest for his 
counsel's sake, declares to the unfaithful soul, to the traitor 
and the apostate, that for him there must be public confes- 
sion, public humiliation, public satisfaction. 

There is no contradiction here at all, and none would 
have been found if men had not come to search the fathers, 
as they often come to search the Scriptures, with precon- 
ceived theories which they were bound to maintain. 

It is scarcely necessary to say that in the cases where 
men complied with such advice as that given by Origen or 
Basil, and there was no necessity for public penance, there 
was also no necessity for absolution. The man was entitled 
to the Holy Communion, and all other privileges which, as 
a living member of the Church, were his. His spiritual 
physician was bound to tell him so. He could, in the 
ancient Church, be in but one of the two divisions. He was 
either entitled to all the sacramental assurances of forgive- 
ness, as a loyal member of the kingdom, or he was not. If 
he was, those sacramental assurances were his continual abso- 
lution, for in all the early Church there was no other. If he 
were not, the priest could not absolve him (that is, admit 
him to the communion again), for that could only be done 
after public satisfaction, and by the bishop personally, or by 
his direction. 

Private confession of sins, private consultations with a 
pastor, the private opening of one's grief to a spiritual physi- 
cian, recommended by ancient writers and by modern, and 



Private Confession. 59 

recommended by many arguments, the force of which we 
would urge at all times, has its distinct place and use in the 
Church of God. Many need it who do not use it. Many 
are repelled from its use because of the distorted thing it has 
been made by a false system. Those who see its use, and 
are trying to make the use a reality, should be very careful 
that they understand its limits and its purposes, and that it 
be not distorted to evil in their hands. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE DECLARATION OF ABSOLUTION, OR REMISSION OF SINS. 

F what we have said hitherto on the subject of absolution 
be correct, we have the means of understanding certain 
things in our own service books, about which, as it appears 
to us, misapprehensions of one kind or another are not un- 
common. 

We have endeavored to set forth the views of primitive 
antiquity on this subject, not as a matter of antiquarian 
curiosity, but as having a living bearing upon ourselves. We 
say, and we have unquestioned ground for the saying, that 
the Reformation, as far as the Church of England was con- 
cerned, was an attempt, more or less conscious from the 
first, and at last with full consciousness, to turn back for 
guidance to the earliest and purest ages. There were known 
evils and corruptions in the Church both in doctrine and 
practice. They had long been admitted, and by the best 
men in Europe bemoaned. But how should they be reme- 
died ? It was in the hands of the Court of Rome to have 
settled the question, and so to have preserved still the unity 
of European Christianity. But as any Reformation would 
inevitably have struck at the claims and pretensions of that 
court, as, in fact, that court was itself one of the corruptions 
that most needed a root and branch reform, it threw its 
whole weight against a demand which had been loud on all 
sides for over a hundred years. 

It was then left to this, that there should be no reform, 
and European Christianity should go on from bad to worse, 



The Declaration. 6l 

or else that it should be undertaken in whatsoever way, 
and by whatsoever instruments were possible. And if there 
was to be a reform by any instrument, there must be some 
rule or law of working, some principle on which the business 
should be conducted. 

The Church of England, we hold, was justified, nay, 
authorized, nay, under penalties, to reform herself, let the 
consequences be what they might temporarily in the way of 
a breach of outward unity. If the bishop of Rome and his 
adherents should ban and curse her for doing her duty and 
clearing her own skirts from the corruptions which all good 
men had long deplored, on their own heads be it. She had 
delivered her soul. And in taking the course she did, she 
was led to adopt, we confess, unconsciously, sometimes, to 
some of her reformers (and in this we see God's hand, and 
not man's) the principle of appealing to antiquity. The 
work was not to be conducted according to the private 
notions of private leaders. The Church of England had no 
Luther, no Calvin, no Knox. No one man was to leave his 
mark and name upon her. Her standard of orthodoxy was 
to be no one man's theories. She held that what she rejected 
were corruptions, and therefore late and new. She sought 
to restore the original purity over which these corruptions 
had grown She was, all along, whether she knew it or not, 
applying the old rule, — " What is first is true, what is late 
is false." Her reformation was a restoration. The early 
Church was her model. Hence the study of antiquity in 
the English Church, almost from the beginning of the Refor- 
mation. Hence her revulsion from scholasticism to simple 
dogmatism. Hence the broad differences which marked her 
from the start, and mark her, and all Churches in communion 
with her, more and more every day, from the mass of mere 
Protestant sects. 

Men talk about "the Church of the future." With her 
there is but one Church. The Church of the future is the 
Church of the past. The Gospel is an " everlasting Gospel " 



62 Absolution. 

— the same forever, and the model for all reform ; the meas- 
ure by which the Church of any age is to dress herself and 
judge herself is the Church that Apostles planted, watered, 
and taught — the new-born kingdom of God, that went forth 
in power eighteen hundred years ago. Church history to 
us, then, is not a cold record of the past. Investigation of 
primitive opinions and methods is not bald antiquarianism. 
We stand in the old paths. We ask after the old ways be- 
cause they are the true ways. Since, therefore, our very 
position binds us to primitive Christianity, since we hold it 
to be the very meaning and logic of that position that the 
Church holds and teaches the unchangeable faith, we can 
see no way more legitimate to explain that position, in what- 
soever it seems to be misapprehended, than by reference to 
the primitive model. 

Whatever, for instance, the Church may teach in the 
matter of absolution, she intends shall agree with primitive 
doctrine. She has no private doctrine on that subject, nor 
on any other. She absolutely scouts the idea that she can 
invent doctrine, — that anybody can invent it. There is no 
such thing as " Anglican doctrine " in her comprehension. 
She has no place for Anglicanism, more than for any other 
ism. There is primitive and unalterable Christian doctrine, 
and that she is bound to guard and teach. What she denies 
to others she denies also to herself, — the right to tamper with 
that sacred trust. What she teaches about absolution is 
identical with what the primitive Church taught. If there 
is any doubt about it, the doubt may be settled by appeal. 
We can find no explanation in scholasticism, for the very 
essence of her view of Christianity is that it is simple dog- 
matism. We can get no help as to her meaning by ques- 
tioning the mediaeval folk, for she washed herself clean of 
mediaevalism. We can find no light in Romish analogies, 
for it was Romanism that compelled her to reform. We can 
go only to the records of the elder Church, — the Scriptures 
and the writings of the doctors of the first ages. 



The Declaration. 63 

We have tried to set forth some views and practices of 
those ages about absolution. We have not quoted as we 
might, but — not to weary our readers — what we judged suffi- 
cient for clearness. In the light of the views and practices 
we have indicated, and remembering the position to which 
the Church is committed, we think we find an explanation 
of certain things in our services. 

In the daily Morning and Evening Prayer there is a 
General Confession, and a Declaration of Absolution or Remis- 
sion of Sins. The confession is " general," because it is 
made by all the people generally, and because it confesses 
sins in general, and not in particular. The " absolution," 
as it is called, is "to be made by the priest alone." 

We note with regard to this that there is nothing like 
this part of our service in primitive forms. It was put be- 
fore the Morning and Evening Prayer at the Reformation, 
at the second revision of the Prayer Book in 1552. The 
reason for putting a confession in general terms, and an 
absolution "by the priest alone," here, is supposed to have 
been to make up for or to discourage the private confession 
and private absolution of the confessional. But whatever be 
the reason, this portion of the service is unique. It is a 
peculiar feature of the Reformation. 

Now, we have seen that there were but really two abso- 
lutions in the primitive Church. The one the absolution of 
the sacraments, the word, and doctrine ; that is, perpetual 
absolution which a man found by living in the kingdom of 
grace ; and the other, the judicial absolution which released 
him from Church censure and restored him to the privileges 
he had forfeited. Strictly, indeed, we might class baptism, 
in the case of adults, with this last, inasmuch as there also 
there must be a judicial act in passing on the candidate's 
fitness for the sacrament, on his knowledge, and on the sin- 
cerity of his repentance and faith. 

Clearly, the absolution in the Common Prayer is not a 
judicial absolution. The priest who pronounces it decides 



64 Absolution. 

nothing. He actually knows nothing to guide him in any 
decision. He simply announces the law of the kingdom. 
As an officer of the kingdom he proclaims the conditions on 
which pardon is granted in the ki?igdom, and he who posses- 
ses the conditions has a right to apply to himself the proc- 
lamation. The absolution is thrown broadcast to Christian 
people free — as God's mercy and grace are free — and whoso- 
ever will may take it. 

It comes, therefore, under the general head of " absolu- 
tion of the word and doctrine." It is meant for those inside 
the kingdom solely. It applies only to those who have true 
repentance and a living faith, — to those only in a state of 
grace and pardon, — to those only who are in living union 
with Christ the head. It announces, formally and officially, 
the law, the perpetual, unchanging law of the kingdom, that 
to those who cling to their Saviour, and fight with their sins, 
and are Christ's faithful soldiers and servants, pardon is 
given daily and hourly for their sins of infirmity and daily 
incursion, their slips and failings. 

We have said this pardon of our service is unique. The 
early Church had it not. Was there, then, no absolution 
granted in the early Church ? We need only refer to what 
we have before quoted in previous chapters. Absolution was 
granted as fully and as freely before this addition was put to 
the services as it is now. It would be granted all the same, 
and the Church would be exercising her full ministerial duty 
in the matter, of course, if it were not said at all. For abso- 
lution does not consist in any form of words said in any 
pronouncing of a technical "absolution," "precatory," or 
"declarative," but in a. fact, — the fact, namely, that a man is 
a living member in the kingdom where the law is absolution, 
where every prayer, every psalm, every reading or hearing 
of epistle, gospel, or lesson, every reception of Holy Com- 
munion, gives him sacramental and ministerial assurance 
that he is absolved all the time. 

It has seemed to us that so much stress has been laid 



The Declaration. 65 

upon this declaration, that some have lowered the dignity and 
efficacy of all the Church's dealings in the matter in order to 
elevate this to a pitch which neither its history nor its doc- 
trinal significance will justify. 

If a man be in church unbaptized, the absolution cer- 
tainly does not absolve him. If he be there under Church 
censure, " repelled " from Holy Communion, the absolution 
does not restore him. It does not absolve him and restore 
him to the "peace of the Church," though he be really peni- 
tent and really believing, should he hear it a thousand times, 
until he is restored by the act of " the ordinary," to whom 
his case was referred. And if one be present, guilty of " mor- 
tal sin," that is, " mortal sin " in the primitive sense, such sin 
as would require him to be disciplined and repelled from 
Holy Communion were it known, it certainly does not ab- 
solve him. 

It is of great and serious importance that this portion of 
our service should be well understood and well explained. We 
have done what no other Church ever did, in placing such an 
introduction to our Daily Prayer. It is on the souls of all who 
have the care of souls among us, at their peril, to see that this 
special provision of ours be not wrested by ignorant people 
to their ruin. And, seriously, we fear it sometimes is, and 
that the very teaching of the Church's power of absolution 
which one hears, and the acceptance of that teaching, while, 
meanwhile, " absolution " is taken to mean the pronouncing 
of a special form of words (the scholastic and mediaeval 
sense), leads more than one into deadly error, — the deadly 
error of habitual sin. 

It is no light thing that an adulterer should think that on 
the next Sunday morning he is absolved from his adultery of 
Saturday ; that natural regret and shame should be mistaken 
for repentance, and that he should apply to himself an abso- 
lution which belongs not to him. It is no light thing that 
the dishonest man, who makes no restitution, and who 
renews his dishonesty on Monday, should imagine that this 



66 Absolution. 

" absolution " removes his guilt. Daily sinning and daily re- 
penting is the road to hell, — when the sins are known and 
presumptuous ; such sins as, in the purer Church, would have 
caused a man's expulsion from the kingdom. The general 
confession is a confession of the sins of daily incursion, the 
remnants of the sinful nature against which a man, penitent 
and believing, is daily fighting and daily crying for help 
to God. The general absolution is the assurance of 
God's grace and mercy to such struggling and faithful souls. 
It is a deadly delusion when men apply it to themselves to 
wipe out their sins presumptuous and wilful; the plain 
breaches of the law and covenant under which they stand. 

We need but to consider that all the services of the 
Church, except, indeed, the baptismal, are intended for " the 
faithful," — the baptized, the communicating, those who are 
in the kingdom and have a right to be there. They are 
services for believing and penitent Christian folk all 
through. 

This penitentiary introduction to the daily prayers is 
meant, therefore, for those for whom all the services are 
meant. It was not intended that this introduction should 
destroy or take the place of Churchly discipline. It is put 
as a part of the ordinary prayers of the faithful ; of those who 
are fighting with their sins ; of those who have a living hold 
on Christ, and who have not turned to the devil in the 
treason of bold transgression. Christ's ministers " declare 
and pronounce to His people, being penitent, the absolution 
and remission of their sins." 

It is well, perhaps, to have a formal announcement, made 
officially, of the law of the kingdom, on every occasion of 
public worship. But it is also well known that the Church, 
which for ages had no such announcement, administered 
the law just as faithfully without it ; that the peculiar form 
we use since the Reformation, though it may have added 
clearness to the apprehension of the law, has added nothing 
at all to the force or validity of its execution ; and that, if we 



The Declaration. &7 

should ever see fit to drop the introduction, and begin, as at 
first, our service with the Lord's Prayer, the faithful would 
find just as full an absolution as they find now. For the 
absolution comes, by the law of the kingdom, to all who ful- 
fil the conditions. Absolution, unless it be judicial, which 
clearly the Prayer Book absolution is not, is not an act, but 
a condition. A man lives absolved if he be really a living 
member of God's kingdom of grace, and every official an- 
nouncement of that grace is an assurance to him, if he has the 
right to apply it, that he does so live. The notion that a 
Christian man vibrates all his life between pardon and con- 
demnation — pardoned this minute, condemned the next; 
absolved when the priest has pronounced a formula, and 
bound in sin next day — is a notion, we suppose, no Church- 
man would hold. 

The form of which we are speaking, then, we conclude to 
be a Declaration of Absolution, as it is called. It is not an 
empty form. It is pronounced officially and authoritatively 
in the name of Christ, by an officer of His household. It is 
a proclamation of amnesty flung broadcast to the Christian 
assembly. Every Christian man truly repentant, truly be- 
lieving, conscious in himself that he is fighting faithfully 
with the remnants of sin in his nature, conscious of the 
working in his heart of the Divine Spirit, by the evidence of 
his life, has a right to make that official declaration his own, 
and comfort his heart with it, as much as if he heard it 
directly from the lips of Christ himself. It is Christ's an- 
nouncement, and not man's ; the very thing the Lord ordered 
His Church to proclaim to the end of time. 

That is to say, it is an " absolution of the word and doc- 
trine," of the same nature as that which is found in all 
prayer and all worship that embrace the promises of Christ. 
It lifts from no man a Church censure. It restores no man 
to communion who has forfeited his place. It does not take 
the place of Church discipline, nor remove the necessity of 
bringing forth "fruits meet for repentance," and proving 



68 Absolution. 

the sincerity of a man's sorrow and turning. It is for the 
faithful, and not for the unfaithful. It is not judicial, nor 
sacramental. It is simply an official proclamation made in 
the Church of God, to men in the Church of God, of the law 
by which they stand, and under which they hope to be saved 
everlastingly. It is not that the pronunciation of the words 
absolves them then and there, so that whereas they were not 
pardoned before entering church they are pardoned now, or 
that when the service has been read by a deacon and the form 
not used, their sins remain upon them. It is not that there 
is any magic power in that special formula, so that it does 
something which is entirely different from what is done by 
any other part of divine service ; so that if it be not said, a 
Christian man goes away unloosed from his sins. 

It is simply the solemn announcement which our Church 
has chosen, for three hundred years, to make, for one way, in 
this form, of the law by which God forgives sins in His king- 
dom, and by which, therefore, His Church may pronounce 
them forgiven on earth. He takes it to whom it belongs. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE WARNING BEFORE COMMUNION. 

11 And because it is requisite that no man should come to the Holy 
Communion, but with a full trust in God's mercy, and with a quiet con- 
science ; therefore, if there be any of you who by this means cannot quiet 
his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let 
him come to me, or to some other Minister of God's Word, and open his 
grief; that he may receive such godly counsel and advice, as may tend to 
the quieting of his conscience, and the removing of all scruple and doubt- 
fulness. 

THIS is the concluding paragraph in the first warning 
set out to be read before Holy Communion in the 
Prayer Book. It is the only place in the Prayer Book where 
anything is said that looks like private confession to a priest, 
and as the word " minister " is used in it, and not " priest," 
it is an invitation equally to "open the grief" to a deacon. 

There is no provision made in it, it will be noticed, for 
what is called, technically, " absolution," — the pronouncing, 
that is, of any set form of words. It looks only to a fit pre- 
paration for receiving the Holy Communion. In that sacra- 
ment is to be found the only possible form of absolution 
which the Church seems to contemplate in this case. Pre- 
viously the minister has been instructed to say : " Therefore, 
if any of you be a blasphemer of God, an hinderer or slan- 
derer of His Word, an adulterer; or be in malice, or envy, 
or any other grievous crime ; repent ye of your sins, or else 
come not to that holy table." 

Here the awful responsibility of receiving the body and 
blood of the Lord unworthily is laid upon the conscience of 



7° Absolution. 

each for himself. He knows himself to be innocent or guilty 
of the crimes named. They are all such crimes as in the 
early Church, whose discipline we have considered, would 
have incurred excommunication and necessitated public 
discipline. They are not those sins of " daily incursion " 
for which daily prayer is the remedy, but sins which are 
high treason against the King and the laws of His king- 
dom, sins which cut the sinner off from the number of the 
faithful. 

He is not to come to " that holy table " until he repent 
first of such sins ; and certainly that warning means that he 
is to make a thorough and complete repentance that will 
stand the test. It is not a hasty and transitory sorrow, ex- 
pressing itself in a few cries for pardon, and a few passionate 
resolutions to sin no more. It is such a repentance as will 
go to the roots of his life, and which will never need to be 
repented of; a repentance which will express itself in some- 
thing equivalent to what the early Christians sought in the 
exomologests. 

To come to such a repentance he will possibly need 
spiritual counsel and advice. He will need to have his sin 
set before him in its enormity ; its wickedness, to which his 
conscience is now half dead, exposed in the light of God's 
Word ; the darkness of his heart and life shown to himself 
by the torch of truth, and the way of return pointed out to 
him. Therefore he is finally advised to go to some minister 
of God's "Word and open his spiritual condition, and take 
counsel for what is needful in his case. 

What might be needful would be just what the early 
Church had and what we have not, — the public penitential 
discipline. We are without that. The spiritual adviser 
must do the best he can without it. That is our unfortunate 
condition. But he is, at least, when necessary, to demand 
something like its equivalent. He has no right to allow the 
penitent to satisfy his soul with a hasty and huddled repent' 
ance which is no real repentance at all. 



Warning Before Communion. 7 1 

There is still another direction in the first rubric in the 
Communion Service which must be taken into account with 
these passages, in order to understand the full sense of the 
Church about admission to Communion. 

The minister is instructed to repel from the Communion 
table a man whom he knows to be an open and notorious 
evil liver, " until he have openly declared himself to have 
truly repented and amended his former evil life." He is 
also ordered, when he does so, " to give an account of the 
same to the ordinary " (the bishop). 

Here the direction recognizes the organic constitutional 
law of the Church on this matter, that the bishop, namely, is 
the officer of discipline. The minister having repelled puts 
the case out of his hands. He has no power to restore. He 
submits the question to the bishop. It passes into the 
bishop's hands to give all directions as to the length of the 
time of the suspension, the necessary evidences of sincerity 
and penitence, and the terms on which restoration may take 
place. 

That is to say, the Church makes penitentiary priests of 
her clergy, each for his own congregation at least. She re- 
quires him to guard the purity of the household ; to repel 
from the Master's table whomsoever he knows to be un- 
worthy ; and instructs him, after a solemn warning, intended 
to keep all evil doers and liars away, to invite any one who is 
in doubt, who cannot see his own way clearly, to come to him 
or some other minister for counsel and advice, that he may 
approach God's altar with a quiet conscience at last. But 
with regard to discipline, to excommunication, and to read- 
mission, she puts the power where the ancient Church put it, 
— into the hands of the bishop. 

This coming for counsel and advice, this recommended 
opening of one's grief, is done, of course, under the bond of 
strict secrecy ; in official spiritual confidence. The clergy- 
man, save in his capacity as clergyman, knows nothing about 
what he has heard. It belongs to his knowledge in his spirit- 



7 2 Absolution. 

ual office, and he is under most solemn bonds to keep it as a 
sacred trust between God and his own conscience, as an 
officer in God's household. 

The American Church says nothing about " absolution " 
in connection with this matter of spiritual counsel, confiden- 
tially and officially. The English Church does. She advises 
a man to " open his grief that by the ministry of God's Holy 
Word he may receive the benefit of absolution." 

The American Church has omitted this reference, and, of 
course, not without a purpose. She must have had some 
meaning in dropping out this allusion, as well as in omitting 
the single instance where the Church of England provides for 
a private absolution, — namely, in the visitation of the sick. 

Whatever may have been the motive or the meaning, it 
is finally the fact that the American Church has made no 
provision for the giving of " absolution," that is, for the pro- 
nouncing of any form of words technically called " abso- 
lution," by her priests, except in the public services. 

It is possible that the omission of the reference to abso- 
lution in the Exhortation may have arisen from the liability 
to mistake it. Indeed, we know it has been and is mistaken. 
It has been interpreted to mean that then and there, as soon 
as the man has opened his grief, the priest is to pronounce 
over him the form of words called absolution, and that he 
seeks counsel and opens his grief for that purpose. 

Now, it is not at all clear that " absolution " in this Ex- 
hortation in the English Prayer Book means the pronouncing 
of any set form of words at all. It is " by the ministry of 
God's Holy Word " he is to receive the benefit of "absolu- 
tion." It is by far the most rational construction to explain 
it to mean that the assurance of pardon and deliverance is to 
be brought to the sinner by citing to him the declarations 
and provisions made in the Word of God, and by praying 
with him and for him, pleading those promises. That is, the 
" absolution * mentioned here, whose " benefit " is to be 
sought, is, from the phraseology, an " absolution of the word 



Warning Before Communion. 73 

and doctrine," and not a judicial one, or one that has any 
reference to Church censure or Church discipline. 

Neither does the force of the language convey ihe idea 
that this " absolution " is a thing to be obtained at the moment 
of the consultation, or, if we please, the confession. The 
exhortation is made that " absolution" — deliverance from the 
bond of sin — may be obtained filially. It may be a neces- 
sarily long process to obtain it. That will depend on the 
character of the "grief" opened and the sin acknowledged. 
Only, " absolution " is the end aimed at, whether near or re- 
mote. 

But with the theories of " absolution " derived from med- 
iaeval sources, and with the interpretation of the word- 
coming from those sources, men were in danger of taking 
this to mean that a man was to go to a priest and " confess," 
and that thereupon the priest was to " absolve " him ; that 
this confession and absolution were distinct things in them- 
selves ; and that without reference to the word and doctrine, 
or to the Holy Communion, a man received a sacramental 
assurance of forgiveness in the technical form of words itself. 

Therefore, possibly, it was left out of the American Prayer 
Book, and considering the danger, we cannot say it was left 
out unwisely ; nevertheless, the object in seeking spiritual 
counsel and advice, and in opening one's grief to a minister, 
is just as distinctly " absolution " in the American Prayer 
Book as in the English. The person seeks these things in 
order to be absolved from the bonds of his sins ; in order to 
purify his conscience and his heart, and obtain Christ's as- 
surance of forgiveness. And this absolution is obtained 
effectually by the ministry of God's Word, by the authorita- 
tive and official setting forth of the terms of pardon in the 
New Covenant, and by prayer. If a specific form of words 
were needed to convey this pardon to a baptized man, then 
both the Church of England and our own have made ill pro- 
vision for the performance of their duty to sinners, inasmuch 
as neither of them, just here, in this consultation or con- 
4 



74 Absolution. 

fession recommended as a preparation for Holy Commun- 
ion, has set forth any form of words at all. 

The Church of England has one form of absolution to be 
given privately in the service for The Visitation of the Sick, 
if the sick person " humbly and heartily desire it." It is 
formal and declarative, — "I absolve thee." The American 
Church has omitted this, because of the danger of its being 
misunderstood and wrested from its purpose. 

We take this absolution to be a judicial one. 1 We have 
said that in the early Church, whenever a penitent was in 
danger of death, there was a rule, almost universal, that " the 
peace of the Church " might be given him. The Church 
would err on the side of mercy. We have seen that in 
pressing cases presbyters, and even deacons, in many local 
churches, had a standing order, in the bishop's absence, to 
restore such penitents and give them Communion. And this 
restoration was judicial. They were put back into the Com- 
munion of the faithful. 

This peculiar "absolution," in this service for the sick in 
the English Prayer Book, is a practice on the ancient rule. 
The sick man is put among the faithful. Even if the sin he 
confesses be such as has cut him off from the Communion of 
the faithful in fact, though not outwardly, considering the 
danger of his sickness, the merciful Church, on his profession 
of repentance, restores him, takes him to her arms, and as- 
sures him that he is a child yet in his Father's house, and as 
a son is forgiven. 

The American Church, by omitting this form of words, 

1 The indicative and peremptory way of absolving is also agreed to be 
of small standing in the Church. . . . We use it but once, and that is in 
our Office for the Visitation of the Sick ; in which case we should, as I 
humbly apprehend, insist with the penitent that, upon his recovery, he do 
submit to a course of discipline before he approach the Holy Communion ; 
which will bring up the case to a pretty near resemblance to that of the 
ancient Clinical Absolutions. — Marshall's Penitential Discipline of the 
Primitive Church, p. 159. 



Warning Before Communion. 75 

has assuredly omitted none of her Churchly powers or func- 
tions. It is certain she did not intend to. It is equally 
certain, therefore, that she considers the performance of this 
function of reconciling sick penitents to her communion, 
and assuring them that their sins are forgiven, quite amply 
and effectively provided for in that service, without any such 
form. And it follows inevitably from her action that she, 
like the early Church, does not consider either ministerial or 
judicial absolution to be conveyed by any set form; but 
the one, in the use of all the means of grace in the kingdom 
as an habitual steady gift ; and the other by an act, formal 
or informal, which restores a man to communion, and con- 
sequently to all the assurances of absolution in the word, 
prayers, and sacrament. 

The priest who has the cure of souls in the American 
Church is put in the position of the spiritual physician spoken 
of by Origen and Basil, as we have quoted. He is called 
upon to hear the confession of sin ; the opening of a sore 
spiritual grief; the stating of a case of soul-sickness. If it be 
the revelation of such sins and sickness as are not deadly ; 
such as would not, had the Church a discipline, subject the 
penitent to that discipline ; such as do not cut the sinner off 
from the communion of the faithful ; such as are not treason 
agaist the King; in short, not presumptous and confessed 
notorious evil living, he has the power to consult with the 
penitent, to advise him, to comfort him and direct him, and to 
remit him at once to all the means of grace ; to assure him 
that if he be truly penitent these means are all his own to 
use, and that he is under the law of forgiveness, and has the 
right to claim ministerial assurance of it in public prayer and 
worship, and in the Holy Communion. 

But if the " grief" opened be a plain coarse sin, such a 
sin as without disguise makes open and deadly breach in the 
covenant, — theft, fraud, perjury, blasphemy, malicious evil- 
doing, fornication, adultery, — what is he to do then ? 

Is it very easy to answer ? In the primitive Church, as 



j6 Absolution. 

we have seen, such cases would have been disciplined through 
some tract of time. We have no such system. Is the " min- 
ister," therefore, to take it upon himself to restore such to 
communion? — judicially to absolve them by continuing them 
in outward communion, and giving them the outward right 
to the continued absolutions of the word and doctrine ? 

We fear this is the way each priest feels himself author- 
ized to act. Practically, he assumes himself to be the officer 
of discipline in his own field, and even if he be consulted by 
some not of his own charge, the officer of discipline in any 
other field in or out of the diocese. In the absence of any sys- 
tem of discipline, each priest, and each deacon even (if he be, 
as he often is, in sole charge of a congregation), takes it upon 
himself to act as the ordinary officer of discipline, the execu- 
tive of Church law, and that without a thought of consulting 
the bishop in whose hands this was reserved through all an- 
tiquity. 

Now, it is easy enough to see what ought to be done in 
such a case by the principles of the primitive Church, and 
by the analogy of the only rule on the subject in our own. 

If the minister shall know any to be an open and notori- 
ous evil liver, he is directed to repel him from communion, 
until he give evidence of repentance and a changed life, im- 
mediately informing the bishop, who thenceforth has the case 
in his hands as to the evidence required, and the length of 
time and the conditions of restoration. 

Now, if the minister " know " this by confession of the 
man, is he not bound to act in the same way, equally ? The 
cases are not rare where a man is known to be by everybody, 
except the minister almost, a notorious evil liver, and the 
minister only learns the fact by the man's own acknowledg- 
ment. Shall he then not repel ? Shall he then take it upon 
himself, if he does repel, to restore of his own motion ? Shall 
he usurp the use of the keys in this respect ? 

Or if, again, the evil living be not "notorious," but care- 
fully kept secret, and the man confesses to an evil living to 



Warning Before Communion. 77 

which he has added sin on sin — lying, hyprocrisy, falsehood 
in word and deed, in order to keep it secret, making it the 
more deadly because the more secret — shall the minister 
consider himself competent to deal with this worse case, 
when the Church refers him to the bishop in the other case, 
by no means so bad, — not so bad because it has not involved 
lying and hypocrisy and mean knavery, and is therefore 
known ? 

We consider it clear, from the whole analogies of the case, 
that here the minister should refer the case to the canonical 
officer of discipline, that he should hear the confession, and 
if it be not of gross breaches of the Ten Commandments, of 
coarse black sins, about which no conscience can mistake, he 
should assure the penitent that if he be truly repentant the 
means of grace will be his cure, — should remand him with 
rebukes, prayers, and counsels, to their better use hereafter. 
But if the sins be crimes — gross, plain outrages, such as we 
have mentioned — he should refer him to the bishop, as he is 
bound to do if the outrages are open and notorious. 

Of course he is pledged to sacred confidence, and of 
course the bishop is so also. And of course the man can 
only, in such case, be advised to resort to the bishop, not 
compelled. But meanwhile he should forbid him the com- 
munion 

It is true this puts the bishop upon a work which seems 
to be little thought of as belonging to his office at present. 
But there are few who will examine the question, who will 
not be struck with the fact that the conception of that office 
commonly held among us is quite a different one from that 
which we find in the early Church, and, for that matter, in 
the Book of Common Prayer. 

At all events, to keep up any discipline which shall not 
be a disgrace to a living and pure Church, it cannot be left 
to the notions of individual ministers. There must be some 
uniform administration of any law. We could not well have 
a man excommunicated from St. John's for something which 



yS Absolution. 

would be no fault at all in St. Luke's, in the next street. We 
cannot have as many disciplines as parishes, and therefore 
in any interpretation of the minister's duty in this regard we 
must take into account the primitive and Catholic rule that 
the bishop, and not "the minister," is the ordinary, — the offi- 
cer of discipline. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE ESSENCE OF ABSOLUTION. 

IN the Church of God for many ages there was no form 
of absolution except prayer. 

In the ancient penitential system, of which we have 
spoken, the penitents were prayed for, with imposition of 
hands, at every stage of their probation. When they had 
passed through the period of that probation, and were ad- 
mitted to Communion, it was by prayer and imposition of 
hands. No variation was made from the accustomed forms. 
There was no pronouncing of any set form of words which 
could be called an absolution. The absolution consisted in 
restoring the penitent to Communion, and apparently in 
nothing else. 

And this absence of any special form of words supposed 
to convey by themselves absolution, continued long after the 
original penitential discipline, with its public humiliation, 
had ceased and given way to private confession and private 
absolution. As late as the thirteenth century the priest 
prayed for the penitent, after his confession, that God 
would pardon him and bring him to everlasting life. 

The ancient penitentials, down to the century named, 
contain no form save the form of prayer ; and even after the 
judicial form, " I absolve thee," was introduced in the West 
it was always joined with prayers before and after. 

At present, in the Church of Rome, penitence is a sacra- 
ment, to the reception of which sacramental confession to a 
priest is necessary. The Council of Trent teaches that in 



So Absolution. 

no other way are sins forgiven — mortal sins — except in this 
sacrament. To it applies almost exclusively — altogether 
exclusively after baptism — the force of the words : " Whose- 
soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and 
whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained." The Eu- 
charist conveys sacramental remission only for "venial sins." 
For " deadly " sins, which in the true theological sense are 
all sins persisted in, there is no sacramental gift of forgive- 
ness except in penance. 

And the form of penance (all sacraments consisting of 
matter and forvi) is found in the words, Ego te absolvo (I 
absolve thee), just as in baptism the essential words are, " I 
baptize thee in the name," etc. Without those words there 
is no absolution. With them there is absolution although 
none others be uttered. 

In Session XIV. chap, iii., we read : " The Holy Synod, 
moreover, teaches that the force of the Sacrament of Pen- 
ance, in which especially its power stands, is placed in these 
words of the minister, Ego te absolvo (I absolve thee), to 
which, indeed, by custom of Holy Church, certain prayers 
are commonly joined, notwithstanding these regard not the 
essence of the form itself, nor are they necessary to the ad- 
ministration of the Sacrament." z 

It is also the teaching of the Council that the priest sits as 
judge, and as judge decides the case. Therefore in chap, v. 2 

1 Docet praeterea Sancta Synodus, sacramenti poenitentiae formam, in 
qua praecipue ipsius vis sita est, in illis ministri verbis positam esse : Ego te 
absolvo, etc., quibus quidem de Ecclesiae Sanctae more preces quaedam 
laudabiliter adjunguntur, ad ipsius tamen formae essentiam nequaquam 
spectant, neque ad ipsius sacramenti administrationem sunt necessariae. — 
Sessio XIV. c. iii. 

2 Ex institutione sacramenti poenitentiae jam explicata universa Eccle- 
sia semper intellexit institutam etiam esse a Domino integram peccatorum 
confessionem, et omnibus post baptismum lapsis, jure divino necessariam 
existere, quia Dominus noster Jesus Christus, e terris ascensurus ad coelos 
sacerdotes sui ipsius vicarios reliquit tanquam praesides et judices, ad quos 
omnia mortalia crimina deferantur, etc. — Sessio XIV. c. v. De Poenitentia. 



Essence of Absolution. 8 1 

of the same session the necessity of full and unreserved 
confession is argued, that he may have wherewithal to judge 
upon. Sins are not confessed mainly that the conscience 
maybe instructed and the sinner put on a new course of life, 
and his " grief " removed, but that he may be judicially ab- 
solved by the judicial formula. 

In nothing more closely than in its decrees about penance 
is the Church of Rome at war with antiquity; and yet, as in 
all its doctrine, so in this, it gives a caricature of primitive 
teaching. 

For if the theory about the form of the sacrament be true ; 
if the words " I absolve thee " be the only words which con- 
vey remission of sins in the exercise of the power of the 
keys ; then nothing is clearer, by the full and free admission 
of Romish writers themselves, than that, for about twelve 
hundred years, the Church never exercised the power of the 
keys at all on baptized people, and no man was, in all that 
time, absolved ; since it was confessed on all hands that the 
form essential to the conveyance of absolution was never 
used ! 

It is clear, from this illustration, that we shall find in the 
modern Church of Rome no light upon the doctrine of abso- 
lution as held in the Church primitive, and consequently 
none on the same doctrine as held by our own. The same 
words are used, but they are used in senses totally different, 
and the unwary should take heed that they be not misled by 
the sameness of sound. 

The Church advises people who cannot quiet their own 
consciences to go to some godly minister and open their 
grief, because a man ought to come to Holy Communion 
with a quiet conscience. That is, the healing of a sick soul 
is the purpose. The minister is a physician. The fathers, 
as we have quoted, advised the same. In their view the con- 
fessor was the spiritual physician. In the Church of Rome 
the confessor is a, judge — sitting in the place of God — Judical 
ut DeuSy — he judges as God, and as God absolves. In fact, 



82 Absolution. 

the Trent Council anathematizes, in Canon VII. 3 of the session 
already quoted, those who teach " that confession is only 
necessary for instructing and consoling the penitent, and 
that it was formerly observed for the purpose of the canoni- 
cal satisfaction imposed," and not also " by divine right 
necessary to salvation." 

Morinus, the author of the great work " De Poenitentia," 
a magazine of all history and learning on this subject, con- 
fesses (as quoted by Marshall in his " Penitential Discipline ") 
that "he could hardly lay down any one proposition con- 
cerning the reconciliation of penitents among the ancients 
but what must differ from the modern usage " in his own 
communion. 

Tested by the historic test, the doctrine of penance, in- 
cluding confession and absolution, as taught in the decrees 
and canons, and in the catechism of the Council of Trent, is 
heresy from first to last. The penance there is not the pen- 
ance of antiquity. The confession there is not the exomolo- 
gesis about which the ancient canons tell us. The absolu- 
tion there was never heard of for twelve centuries, and even 
after grew only gradually into use. 

To understand the primitive doctrine of absolution, a 
man must free his mind from the notion that it consists in 
any form of words whatever, — for such form of words he 
cannot find. The notion that remission is conveyed only 
by pronouncing any form of words, declaratory, precatory, 
indicative, or what not, is a relic of scholasticism for which 
no ground is found in antiquity. In removing a Church 
censure, in restoring a man to the communion he had for- 
feited, considering the act as one done in the court external 
of the visible Church, it would seem as though we might ex- 
pect such an expression as " I absolve thee," meaning thereby 

3 Si quis dixerit . . . earn confessionem tantum esse utilem ad erudi- 
endura et consolandum poenitentem et olim observatam fuisse tantum ad 
satisfactionem canonicam imponendam . . . anathema sit. — De Sanctis- 
simo Poenitentiae Sacramento, Can. VII. 



Essence of Absolution. &2> 

" I free thee (as an officer of the Church) from Church cen- 
sures, and restore thee again among the flock," and yet we 
find no such expression even in that connection. 

When the penitent had gone through his course he was 
admitted, as a matter of course ; that was all, and there was 
no need of so many words. The outward act of going among 
the communicants again was his absolution. The Church had 
bound him with the censures and the canonical bonds of 
his penance, and now, having completed his trial and satisfied 
her, she loosed him ; but his loosing was not in the force of a 
phrase, but in his restoration to communion. 

The Church of Rome has so bewitched and bemuddled 
the matter that she reverses the process. She looses first, 
and, in the sense of the primitive Church, binds afterward. 
For the bond which the Church puts upon a man is the bond 
of discipline; some works of penance to be done, some time 
to stand excommunicated and under censure. And she 
looses when she takes off this bond, removes this censure, 
and restores a man again to the full privileges he had for- 
feited. 

But the universal practice in the Church of Rome is to 
absolve first, and then inflict the penance afterward ! The 
absolution is conferred in the view of a penance which yet 
remains to be performed. The man is restored to Commun- 
ion, and yet is bound under penance ! And that penance 
usually consists of prayers and fastings and almsgiving, — 
such good works as all Christians are bound to perform, and 
which cannot, in the Christian sense, be called punishment. 

In the Roman sense our Church has no absolution at all 
for sins after baptism, for every deadly sin must be con- 
fessed and absolved in sacramental confession and absolu- 
tion ; otherwise there is no pardon. Even the Holy Eucharist, 
as we have seen, only gives sacramental remission of venial 
sin, and the words " I absolve thee " are the words of power. 
Unless those words are pronounced the sinner is not par- 
doned. Just as the baptismal formula is necessary to a valid 



84 Absolution. 

baptism, so these words are necessary to a valid absolution ; 
and without them no man's sin is remitted. 

If any talk about " sacramental confession " or " sacra- 
mental absolution," they should know whereof they speak. 
They should understand that the full doctrine to which these 
phrases refer and on which they stand is, that confession and 
absolution, with a specific form of words, are parts of a sacra- 
ment especially instituted to convey forgiveness of post-bap- 
tismal sin, and that such sin is forgiven in no other sacrament 
or means of grace whatever. 

Our Church has left penance out of the number of the 
sacraments. She has omitted its form from every one of her 
services. She nowhere authorizes her minister to say, " I 
absolve thee." She nowhere teaches that forgiveness of sin 
is found alone in any special sacrament. 

Shall we say, then, that she does not exercise the power 
of the keys? that she has abdicated one of the functions 
of the Church Catholic ? that she has deprived herself of 
the power of speaking peace and pardon to the burdened 
soul ? that she cannot cleanse the conscience, or say to the 
trembling penitent, " Thy sins are forgiven thee," or, " Neither 
do I condemn thee : go, and sin no more ? " 

We confess, indeed, that she is not carrying out the 
ancient law of discipline ; that she is far from attempting it 
even, at present ; but we hold that what she has of it is right 
as far as it goes, and that, judging from the fruits, it is better, 
feeble though it be, than the corrupt caricature of the ancient 
discipline practised by Rome, which, with her impudent falsi- 
fication of all history, she declares to be " from the beginning." 

But our Church does distinctively and publicly claim that 
she is in the full exercise of the power of binding and loos- 
ing, as that power is conferred. She commits it to her 
priests at their ordination, unless that solemn ordination be 
a sham. She proclaims it to her people in every public ser- 
vice. And we hold distinctly that the power on earth to 
forgive sins is in her hands, and is everywhere exercised by 



Essence of Absolution. 85 

her, as the ancient Church understood that power. We hold 
also that the priest who goes outside her authorized forms to 
foist in, in private or in public, any forms or methods under 
the notion that they are more valid, or that he needs to sup- 
plement what the Church authorizes, is in error on the doc- 
trine of absolution, and is guilty of an insult and a treason 
to the Church whose commission he bears. 

For the Church, after the ancient example, practises but 
two absolutions : one, the absolution of the word and doc- 
trine and sacraments ; the other, the judicial absolution, 
which is exercised when a man's case is decided upon by 
competent authority, after he is excommunicated, and he is 
restored to communion again. 

The first is exercised all the time by every clergyman in 
the performance of his functions. He gives sacramental 
absolution and remission of sins in baptism, — even a deacon 
does so. He pronounces it in " the declaration of absolu- 
tion," in the prayers, in the public reading of Holy Scripture, 
in the Litany, in the blessing of peace. All his life long he 
is proclaiming the great amnesty ; passing over to all that 
will receive it, sealed and signed, the great forgiveness of the 
Redeemer, the great absolution of the Eternal Priest, whose 
earthly agent he is. He can teach nothing in all his ministry 
without teaching absolution, for the whole business of the 
Gospel to the end of time is the deliverance of men from 
their sins. 

A man in the Church, living in faith and repentance, 
finds absolution in every act of worship, finds the confirma- 
tion of the great law coming home to him in every voice the 
Church utters. He is in a "state of salvation," and that is 
a state of forgiveness. He is absolved always. The Church 
pronounces him so absolved, by the command of her Lord. 
That her acts are ministerial, declarative, sacramental, takes 
nothing from their validity. That is all they can be. She 
can only act out on earth a transcript of God's action in 
heaven. She can only, as the kingdom of God, carry out 



S6 Absolution. 

God's law. And as God's law is pardon to repentance, so is 
hers. She walks daily with that law in her hands and asks 
all to come and make it their own. She cannot force it on 
any. It is a free gift. It must be taken as a free gift. 

But she guards her children from supposing that absolu- 
tion from their sins comes to them from one form and 
not from all, that it is a thing which they have to-day and 
cannot have to-morrow, that they are this hour the children 
of wrath, and the next moment, by the utterance of a stereo- 
• typed formula, children of grace. She does not dare to play 
fast and loose in this way with human conscience and Chris- 
tian character. She instructs her children to claim their 
birthright, and hold that birthright to be salvation from 
their sins. 

If any be troubled in mind or conscience she advises 
them, in the ancient way, to consult with some wise spiritual 
physician who shall put them on a course to ease their con- 
sciences and restore them to the sense of God's favor and par- 
don again. But she authorizes no formula, lest, as has come 
to pass in Romanism, forgiveness should be attributed to the 
formula of a moment, and not to the fact that one is living 
daily under the law of forgiveness. Her instructions look 
to bring the penitent back under that law where is peace 
and comfort and calm. We believe that she holds, that is, 
as the ancient Church held, that a Christian man is forgiven 
always by the law of his position, and that the absolutions — 
ministerial, declarative, and sacramental — which the Church 
administers, committing them more or less to every order of 
her ministry, are his, to make his own ; his to use, that he 
may live up to that law by holding him to its conditions ; his 
to accept as personally and specifically his own, when he finds 
his conscience condemns him not. 

But the Church, like every living Church, must have 
judicial absolution as well. And this can have reference 
only to the outside court of Churchly discipline. It may be 
necessary to repel a man from communion for his outrageous 



Essence of Absolution. 8? 

and presumptous breach of the Christian covenant. To re- 
store him is to act judicially. This power the Church has, 
as of old example, lodged in the hands of the bishop. The 
clergyman who repels a man at once informs his diocesan. 
If this man goes on attending Church he hears the Declara- 
tion of Absolution, so called, pronounced again and again, but 
it does not absolve him. The absolution of word and doc- 
trine and sacraments has no reference to him. It belongs 
to those inside, and he is yet outside. What he first needs 
is the judicial and official absolution which shall remove 
Church censure and restore him to communion. 

And it would seem as though this was, by the Church's 
intention, placed in the hands of the bishop. True, indeed, 
he may accept the priest's action as his own ; may acquiesce 
in his arrangements, and be thoroughly satisfied with his 
treatment of the case. But the action is valid, not because 
the priest did it, but because the bishop accepted it, and 
when the man is restored, he is restored by the bishop's 
authority, expressed or implied. 

And just here comes in something which may explain to 
us the difference between the accidents and the essence of 
absolution. The bishop, on being officially informed of a 
case of repulsion, may conduct it altogether by letter; may 
be perfectly satisfied so to do ; and after due trial, and being 
satisfied of the penitent's sincerity, may restore him to com- 
munion by letter, — the mail may actually convey a judicial 
absolution. Nay, more, if it be desirable that the penitent 
be admitted to communion again on a certain day — when 
one of his children receives first Communion say, or when 
his aged father or mother is with him temporarily — and the 
mail cannot convey the permission in time, the restorative 
sentence might conceivably be sent by telegraph. So far, in 
the ancient Church theory, or our own, is absolution from 
consisting in any special formula, announced in any special 
way. 

The man entitled to Holy Communion, entitled to sit at 



38 Absolution. 

God's board and partake as a son of his Father's table, is, in 
the opinion and by the law of the Church on earth, an ab- 
solved man. He sits at that feast, and the banner over him is 
love, — God's infinite love. To admit him to that table is to 
absolve him, do it in what form we may. And it has been so 
held in the Church universal always. He may not be ab- 
solved inwardly. He may be eating and drinking damnation 
to himself, but the Church visible can only act visibly. He 
is there j and in her eyes he has the "wedding garment." 
Only the King himself can see whether he has it really. As 
far as Church censure and Church absolution go, the man 
at the Holy Communion kneels absolved. Howsoever the 
Church admits him, therefore, she accepts the fact, and so 
considers him. Admission to her Communion is what con- 
stitutes the essence of her absolution in either form. 



CHAPTER XI. 

ITS NEED. 

WE have been speaking of the power left among men 
to forgive sins, by our Lord, and its meaning and 
limitation. 

Now, there is no positive institution of Christianity that 
has not a necessity for its existence in some need of human 
nature. Our Lord, the Master of men, knows the crea- 
tures He has made, and when He sends them a religion, that 
religion will be exactly fitted to their nature and position. 
We may say from this side of the question, that the power 
of absolution was left in the Church because this power was 
absolutely necessary to the well-being of men. 

Let us see if we cannot discover the want in humanity 
which this positive institution is intended to supply. 

When once a man is borne down by the sense of his sin, 
he has but two courses before him : he must either turn and 
repent and amend, or he must go headlong to ruin. There 
is nothing that leads to the latter result so surely as the sense 
of shame and disgrace before men. When a man has no 
prospect of being restored to the respect of his kind, he is 
reckless. He has fallen so low that he has reached bottom. 
He can do nothing. You may tell him God forgives him, 
but your words have no meaning ; because man will not for- 
give him. Make an outcast of him ; close every door against 
him ; refuse him the clasp of every human hand, the greeting 
of every human tongue ; let all shrink from him as from a 



9° Absolution. 

moral leper, and God's forgiveness will sound to such an one 
like the emptiest talk. 

Men have this fearful power to bind on earth. They 
can hand a man over to utter despair and shame. They 
can brand the sinner with the brand of Cain ; can send him 
forth with the curses of his kind upon him, and assure his 
ruin because they take away all hope. 

It is a fearful power, and sometimes it is fearfully exer- 
cised. Society sometimes bars out the fallen and secures 
their ruin by refusing to open its doors to any return. But 
society is very capricious. Its laws are not God's. It visits 
wrong-doers very unjustly, letting one escape, and exacting 
the last farthing from another far less guilty. 

The condemnation of men shuts up the fallen to his 
sins ; and the forgiveness of men is the first thing, in many 
a case, necessary to his deliverance. Man's verdict is, 
indeed, not always God's ; and yet man's verdict has often 
the power of executing itself, as if it were Divine. 

To tell a sinner crushed down by shame that men forgive 
him ; that they will accept his repentance and restore him to 
his forfeited place, and try him again, is the only way, often, 
to give him any hope in the mercy of God. For what man 
forgives, surely God can and will forgive. What man refuses 
to forgive, — how can the Holy God forgive what sinful man 
does not ? 

Men have this power in a degree, by nature, over men. 
And there is nothing for which the sinner often yearns so 
pitifully as the sound of forgiving words from human lips. 
It will drive a sinner often to confess a sin which no human 
creature need know but himself. He cannot bear his load 
in loneliness. He may read God's promises. He may hear 
them. He may, after a sort, believe them. He may try to 
make them his own. But he is not content. He wants to 
hear a human judgment, and thus forestall the Divine. He 
wants assurance from human lips that he is forgiven, or that 
he can be. He is driven to confess by the necessity of his 



Its Need. 9 1 

Own heart. He cannot bear his crushing load alone. He 
longs to tell it all, and ask, " Will God forgive me ? " 
" Could you forgive me ? " and the assurance that a man for- 
gives him — can and will forgive him — is the assurance that 
God forgives. The heavy load rolls off. Despair goes, and 
trembling hope takes its place in the darkened heart. 

Let a man weighed down with a sense of guilt go to 
some good man whom he reverences, in whom he has con- 
fidence, whose conscience he believes pure, whose life he 
knows spotless, and let him tell this man of his sin. He 
dreads to do it. The very purity and integrity to which he 
wants to appeal fright him, sinner that he is, away. But he 
overcomes his dread and shame and reveals his sin. At that 
moment the man he has consulted holds in his hands, as the 
sinner feels, the judgment, almost, of heaven. He represents, 
to the guilty, man's judgment and God's. He stands for the 
sacredness of the law and for the executioner of justice or 
of mercy. 

And this good man says : "I forgive you." He makes 
no appeal to anything higher. He acts simply as one man 
dealing with another. He claims no priestly prerogative. 
He says simply : " I have heard your story. Your guilt is 
great. Your penitence should be so. I believe it is. And 
because of that sorrow and broken-heartedness, I, as one 
man dealing with another, declare that I can and do forgive 
you. Detesting as I do your sin, I yet consider it forgiven, 
and hold you my friend as before. There is my hand 
upon it." 

We might call this the merely natural and human action 
in such a case — a thing that might be done by any good 
man whatever; and yet one can see how, in such a case, 
the assurance of the man's forgiveness would be almost the 
assurance of God's. 

For would not the sinner say : " If my friend, honest, 
upright, and true, forgives, I need not despair. God will 
forgive what man can. This good man does not loathe me 



9 2 Absolution. 

nor leave me. He still holds me his friend, even in his grief 
at my fall. If I find this the measure of human kindness 
and pity, shall I distrust the tenderness and pity that are 
infinite and divine ? " 

Now, it was to meet this longing in human nature for 
man's judgment upon man's sins — for man's pity and pardon 
as types of God's — that, of necessity, in God's kingdom, is 
found the "power on earth to forgive sins." 

Any Church, to do her duty on this earth, among men, 
as men are, must hold and exercise the power of hearing 
confession and pronouncing pardon. She could not be a 
Church without it. She stands, as Ave have said, God's rep- 
resentative on earth ; the exponent here of the law and 
morals of heaven. She is sent to deal with men with such 
wants as we have seen ; with men burdened by lonely loads 
of guilt which they yearn to lay down at some human feet ; 
with men who want human judgment to assure them of the 
divine; with sinners who want to hear pity and pardon 
from human lips, that they may have trembling faith to 
believe pity and pardon can come also from God. 

And the vague power which, in a way, as we have seen, 
any good man does under certain circumstances exercise, is 
made, in the kingdom, a definite and precise power, which 
speaks with the voice of authority and in the name of God. 

There is perhaps no power which the Church possesses 
which she is so cowardly in the using as this power of deal- 
ing with sins. And the cowardice comes from her own 
unfaithfulness. A Church, standing upon and living by 
God's heavenly law, can be very bold in dealing with sin, and 
very pitiful in forgiving it. But a Church yielding to world- 
liness and accepting the law of the earth, can deal but 
weakly with the punishment of sin, and her forgiveness of it 
is more from criminal carelessness than from divine pity. 

For it is one of the laws of forgiveness that none forgive 
so freely and so fully as the pure. None forgives like the 
holy God. Among men none forgive like the cleanest- 



Its Need. 93 

hearted. And among Churches the worldly and lukewarm 
Church will be the Church that deals most hardly with the 
known and disgraced sinner. She is careless about purity 
so long as impurity is concealed, but she is so conscious of 
her own faithlessness that she cannot venture to be forgiv- 
ing when the sin is also a shame. Only a pure and therefore 
a brave Church can dare to be that. The worldly Church 
always " vindicates her purity " by being coldly and cruelly 
unforgiving to "the publicans and harlots." The Church 
alone that is holy, somewhat like her Master, can, like her 
Master, afford to forgive both. 

We have said that the Church is an outpost of God's 
kingdom here on earth. Her laws are not the world's laws, 
nor her morals the world's morals. She has her own code 
of both, and it should be a transcript from heaven. 

Now, this body, claiming to act and stand upon the law of 
heaven, and to deal with men in God's name, and by God's 
authority, presents herself to sinners, such as we have seen 
them. 

She is ready to hear their confessions because they must 
confess to find peace. She is ready to pronounce them for- 
given and take them to her arms as the most emphatic and 
sufficient assurance that God forgives them and takes them 
to His. They are not tried by one conscience, no matter 
how unerring. Her voice is the voice of all good men. Her 
conscience is the conscience of all good men. And if the 
sinner can take the word of one good man whom he rever- 
ences as almost to him the pardon of God, how much more 
will he take the corporate voice of the body that represents 
not only all good men's opinions and all good men's con- 
science, but also the thought and judgment of the Lord? 
The body that represents on earth the will and the ways of 
God does not cast him out to despair. Sinner as he is, she 
is not too holy to take in such as he. The voice of all the 
good pardons him. The arms of all the good are ready to 
receive him. Stained and spotted though he be, the Church 



94 Absolution. 

which reads those flaming Ten Commandments, as her eter- 
nal moral rule, consigns not to a hopeless fall the man who 
may have broken them all, and who yet will come trembling 
in fear and penitence, and unburden his soul of guilt. 

For it is the whole Church that absolves. She may com- 
mit the exercise of the power, as she does, to one class of 
her officers. But they represent her and act for her, and 
their voice is her voice. When the executive pardons, he 
pardons for the whole State His act is the act of the State. 
Nevertheless, no man in the State can pardon except the 
highest executive. The whole authority of the State in this 
matter speaks through the chief magistrate. A man par- 
doned by him is pardoned everywhere. 

A curious illustration of the idea that the Church is 
really the absolver — the Church as a kingdom and common- 
wealth — is found in the " Sarum Ritual," from which the abso- 
lution in our own Communion Service is taken. 

In that mediaeval ritual the priest confessed the people, 
and the people immediately in the same words confessed 
the priest ; the priest absolved the people, and the people 
absolved the priest. 1 Both used the same words. 

1 Sacerdos, respiciens ad altare, Confiteor Deo, beatae Mariae, omnibus 
Sanctis, vertens se ad chorum, et vobis peccari nimis cogitatione, locutione, 
et opere ; mea culpa. Respiciens ad altare, Precor sanctam Mariam, et 
omnes sanctos Dei, respiciens ad chorum, et vos, orare pro me. 

Chorus respondeat ad eum conversus, Misereatur, etc. 

Postea, primo ad altare conversus, Confiteor, etc. ; deinde ad sacerdo- 
tem conversus, ut prius sacerdos se habuit ; deinde dicat sacerdos ad 
Chorum : Misereatur, etc. 

The "Misereatur" is the Absolution, as the "Confiteor" is the Con- 
fession. It is pronounced by the choir, representing the people, over the 
priest, as by the priest over the choir, as above. 

I translate the "Misereatur:" 

" May God Almighty have mercy upon you and remit to you all your 
sins. May He deliver you from all evil, and preserve and strengthen you 
in all good, and bring you to everlasting life. Amen. May the Almighty 
and merciful God grant you absolution and remission of all your sins, 
space for true repentance, amendment of life, and the grace and consola* 
tion of the Holy Spirit. Amen." 



Its Need. 95 

The power of absolution is not a thing conferred for the 
aggrandizement or glory of any class of men or any set of 
officers. It is not a power which can be used arbitrarily, or 
withheld at the will of him who exercises it. It is given for 
mercy to men, for the good of men, to fill the needs of men, 
and is to be used under due responsibilities and solemn sanc- 
tions. An unjust excommunication is no excommunication. 
An unjust absolution is no absolution. Neither the one nor 
the other can be flung about at random by him into whose 
hands, as a solemn trust, the Church has committed them. 
Both are powers standing under law, and the exercise of 
each is limited and measured by law. Absolution, like the 
Sabbath, is made for man, and not man for absolution. All 
that belongs to it is a part of the blessed Gospel which was 
sent for man's salvation. The salvation, and that only, is 
the end of its use. 

The Church cannot allow this power to drop from her 
hands without failing in an essential of her duty. She is 
bound also to expel the guilty, bound to exercise the power 
of the keys, as an essential part of her business in this world. 

We have become confused on the matter. We have seen 
God's beneficent gift of pardon, left with His Church, so 
abused that its exercise has come to be called " priestly ar- 
rogance;" that the very claim that Christ's word remains a 
living word yet, has come to be understood as an assump- 
tion of human conceit and pride. 

For ourselves we believe that word to be living. But a. 
Church to pardon must be also a Church to punish. The 
two are correlative. The absolutions of a Church that never 
binds are meaningless absolutions in the eyes of men. To- 
have this blessed power of absolution realized and used, to 
have it a living and loving thing that opens the gate of hope 
to the guilty and the door of peace to the sore troubled, we 
must also have the exercise of the judicial power of con- 
demnation. 

A holy and righteous Church putting in force God's spot- 



96 Absolution. 

less laws, vindicating their purity and majesty in her disci- 
pline without fear or favor, on beggar and prince alike, is 
alone the Church whose absolution sounds somewhat like 
God's, and which speaks with the echoes of heaven when 
she proclaims to the broken-hearted, " Thy sins are for- 
given." 



THE WORKS OF 

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON, 

Bishop of Mississippi. 



THE WORLD AND THE LOGOS. The Bedell Lectures 
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ABSOLUTION. In the Light of Primitive Practice. Second 
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MINOR PAMPHLETS. 
THE OFFERTORY: A Lost Act of Worship. 5 cents. 

WORK AND PAY. A Labor Day Sermon Preached in 
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